WAR FLAMES 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



WAR FLAMES 



BY 
JOHN CURTIS UNDERWOOD 



2fam fork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1917 

All rights reserved 






\ 






Copyright, 1917 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1917. 



I 26 1917 



CI.A460470 



TO FRANCE 
AND THE REST 



The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to 
various books, magazines and newspaper articles, notably, 
A Journal of Impressions in Belgium by May Sinclair, 
My Year of the Great War by Frederic Palmer, The Dark 
Forest by Hugh Walpole, The Red Horizon and The Great 
Push by Patrick Macgill, My Home in the Field of Honor 
by Francis Wilson Huard, Ten Million Refugees by Richard 
Washburn Child and Four Weeks in the Trenches by Fritz 
Kreisler, from which material for many of his poems has 
been adapted directly, in part. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword xiii 

BELGIUM 

Life 3 

Miners in Belgium 5 

Palais des Fetes 7 

The Lord's Supper 10 

The Shrine 11 

Soeur Cecile 12 

Infantry Training 14 

La Libre Belgique 16 

GERMANY 

Entraining 21 

The Regiment 23 

The Battery 25 

Headquarters 26 

Tags 28 

Death in the Air 30 

Atrocities 33 

Vivisection 34 

Shadows 36 

Essen 40 

Poisoned Wells 42 

FRANCE 

The Siding 47 

The Rose Garden 48 

iz 



x CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Blood Transfusion 49 

The Decoration 5 1 

The Prison Camp 53 

The Aria 54 

Beside the Marne 57 

Alsace, 1915 58 

The Plane and the Shadow 60 

The Lavoir 65 

Roads in France 7° 

Deportation 7 2 

Spring in Picardy 75 

ENGLAND 

The English Fleet 81 

The Reef S3 

The House of Lords 84 

Munitions 87 

Poisoned Gas 89 

The Sea Hawk 9 1 

The Poet 94 

The Assault 97 

The Machine 100 

A Sentry 103 

The Stretcher Bearer 104 

Tanks 107 

RUSSIA 

The Dawn 113 

The Ark "5 

Pinsk 118 

Ten Million Refugees 121 

The Spy 129 

The Dance 131 



CONTENTS xi 

ITALY 

PAGE 

The Red Cross Chauffeur 135 

Beppino 139 

The Recess 143 

The Transport 144 

AUSTRIA 

The Monastery 149 

The Operation 151 

Mitzi 155 

Diminuendo 160 

SERBIA 

The Trap 165 

The Massacre of Motors 166 

MONTENEGRO 
Vera 171 

TURKEY 
In Armenia 177 

BULGARIA 
The Prophet 185 

ROUMANIA 
The Assize 189 

ENVOY 
Our Share 193 



FOREWORD 

Now that the world is dark, the ways are foul, the weak- 
lings trembling tread; 

Now that war's breakers roil the seas from beach to beach 
with dead; 

Now that all light is darkened; new shadows in the air, 

Where death stamps earth with flying feet defile dawn's 
altar there, 

And fairy cobwebs filmed with dew, and children's wonder- 
ing eyes, 

Are blackness, blood and emptiness where mothers agonize. 

Now that the lights are dimned, all outer dark rolls near 

new tides of night: 
Now that the earth spawns blood and hate and steel 

and dynamite, 
Now men grope bent in cellars blind down raw trench 

trails of war 
For some new clew to life we lost who served its Minotaur. 
Now that the older nations there must wrestle on their 

knees, 
With angels on that flaming stair; art thou less loved 

than these? 



Xlll 



BELGIUM 



LIFE 

An aeroplane soars in the sun, and a spatter of shrapnel 
breaks into bursting bubbles of life below it. 

An English monitor miles at sea is shelling the German 
lines near Ostend. 

A bugle startles a skylark to singing as a troop of Belgian 
cavalry takes its morning exercise on the sand. 

And a Belgian mother in black brings her baby down to 
play, where the land and sea are meeting in little 
children's claspings and lispings of love. 

She lies near the rise of the dunes where the sandpinks still 
shine in the sun. 

But the boy marches bravely on to the tide line to build his 
sand fort in the fringe of the waves. 

He is sturdy and serious, blonde as Albert the King, and 
square-browed and square-chinned and square-jawed. 

He scoops out his trenches and piles high his citadel, plant- 
ing his own little Belgian flag on the brow of the 
mound. 

He builds steadily and precisely but slowly and awk- 
wardly too, for his left hand is lost at the wrist. 

The mother lies on her back on the dune and lets the wind 
fan her face and the sun warm her flesh. 
3 



4 WAR FLAMES 

She opens dull eyes full of pain as old as life itself, and tries 
to let the brightness and the blueness of the skies soak 
into them. 

She tries to count the clouds and the sandpinks that cluster 
near her, as men count sheep to conjure sleep to them, 

And she shudders and turns and lies dry-eyed and quiver- 
ing on the dune, clutching dry sand that crumbles in 
her hands. 

She rises and paces, a black sentinel of sorrow, along the 

gray skyline of the dune, 
And the boy gets to his feet and shades his eyes with his 

single hand as the monitor swings nearer and fires 

faster. 
And the last echo of her guns is gone, and the mother is still 

staring with eyes of intolerable love and longing 

toward Louvain, 
And the boy is still crouching, building in the sun his 

citadel and its outworks awkwardly and persistently. 
For he is life that with maimed hands must still build on, 

as God builds stars, the soul's strong places of to- 
morrow's battlefields. 

March 4, 1916. 



MINERS IN BELGIUM 



MINERS IN BELGIUM 



They thirst, they hunger and they sweat, half naked, 

blackened, stained with night; 
In iron mines and coal pits prisoned where their war 

lords their fetters forge. 
Filth feeds on them; fear bleeds from them the brains, the 

hopes, the faith of men. 
Their food becomes a drug at last. Not morphine, heroin, 

cocaine, 
A darker slavery of habit ordains that God may die today. 

For they are slaves in darkness sealed, and mangled wills 

that once were men; 
The dying dreams, prayers, sanctities and passions women 

lived to love; 
Shrewdness and humor, courage, joy; all broken, rotting 

and reduced, 
Like the last lust of hate itself, to pain's brute infamy. 

Their lips 
Unmask a sick wolf's fangs. Their voice sinks to dumb 

slaver where they die. 

And in their darkness they remain a rotting wound upon 

the world, 
Not Belgium's here to bear alone, but something black 

that shall infect 



6 WAR FLAMES 

Women and men who suffer this wherever greed is God, 

and fear 
Has murdered faith in mobs that meet to pray for peace 

before the hour 
God who is justice weighs it out, to each his earnings 

utterly. 

Here they are sacrificed for us. For nothing less suffices time 

To wake the sleepers of the world to the crude weight of 
wickedness 

That Man's machines have multiplied through two new 
centuries of shame, 

Of greed enthroned and insolent wherever street meets 
street. They die; 

And dying, in the deathlessness of torment, make tomor- 
row sure. 

Each step they drag, each breath they draw brings near 
the hour when men must choose, 

And for their choice stand forth to die, holding back noth- 
ing more and more, 

Till the filled scales of justice sway and tremble in the 
test supreme. 

And then these miners' murdered souls remembered shall 
be mightier 

Than the machines that eat them up. And one, foreseeing 
this, is smiling. 

September 2, 19 15. 



PALAIS DES FETES 



PALAIS DES FETES 



There are thousands of refugees in the Palais des Fetes 

that Ghent was proud of yesterday. 
It stands in green fields that once spelled peace and plenty, 

where tall poplars wigwag terror now on every wind 

that arrives. 
The winds rattle the windows of this huge house of shaken 

happiness insistently. 
They raise lingering perfumes of forgotten flower fetes 

in its garrets, where white faced watchers in black 

besiege the windows. 
They whip gay acres of swaying begonias that bloom for 

war to waste; they whip gray dust into gray faces, 

drifting like driven cattle still before them. 

There are ten thousand now, bedded like beasts in straw 

around the Central Court. 
They lie sleeping sodden and dumb, and dead with fatigue, 

sprawling gray black heaps of bulbs of human souls 

that the great gardener has gathered here in haste. 
It is a new nursery of human suffering, human hope, 

courage and kindness, and flowers of faith deferred, 
And some day after the storms of hate and horror are 

ended, the flowers will bloom and begin to grow here 

fairer than ever before. 



8 WAR FLAMES 

There is pity and pitiableness beyond any utterance, in 

the people lying fallen here, and in the men and 

women met from Belgium and abroad to minister to 

them. 
Thousands have come leaving all behind but the black on 

their backs, or a clock, or a camera, or a vase, or a 

violin in their hands. 
They have left all but the dust of Belgium, fouling faces 

shadowed by sights and sounds of Belgium raped and 

tortured, that wakeful bodies and brains still conceive, 

and twitching lips still tremble to. 
And for them there is nothing any man or woman on earth 

can give or can do today. 
Only a crust of bread and a cup of water from time 

to time to prolong and intensify a dry eyed unending 

agony. 

The rest have left hope behind them with their broken 

hearts in houses that burning by fire can no more 

cleanse than kindness can restore. 
Some have suffered longer and are stronger to suffer all 

they have seen and heard and told and shared with 

others. 
There are sodden human dregs of despair that war has 

brayed in mortars of fire and steel, till the red sponges 

of war seem to suck the last heart beats of blood 

from them. 



PALAIS DES FETES 9 

And there are some nursing something human still in the 
little living body of a dog or a cat or a rabbit or a 
bird, that they have carried far and still cling to. 

And in many greed and hatred are waking to life again, 
like the vice and the vermin thawed from torpor to 
breed horribly in this stained bedding of straw. 

There is no light in all Belgium, in all earth, tonight, to 
cleanse and to heal this new putrifying sore upon the 
bleeding flesh of man; 

Only deep sleep and some diviner anaesthetic that God 
drips drop by drop, day by day, from His sponge of 
stars in night, to allay and to heal the hurts of the 
hearts of men. 

And two younger lovers lie asleep smiling hand in hand 
across the space of straw between them. 

And a man's arm goes out unconsciously round his wife 
as unconsciously she tosses and turns to him. 

And a child nestles nearer to its mother and sighs as it 
rustles in the straw. 

And that one tender sigh in innumerable dry rustlings of 
the straw already fecund with life that breeds every- 
where in warmth and in night, is truth ineffable. 

February 29, 1916. 



io WAR FLAMES 



THE LORD'S SUPPER 



They come to the bare tables patiently as they filed past 

high altars in her ruined cathedrals at Christmas or 

Easter. 
And they have fasted long before coming to this last low 

mass in the middle of ruined Belgium. 
Their hands and their faces are foul with her as the hearts 

and the senses of the men that marched them here. 
They come from the highways and the hedges, and they 

have no wedding garment of mirth such as Christ 

made at Cana. 

They have no wine such as Christ made, but coffee black 

and bitter, steaming and cooling in soiled and in 

clumsy cups. 
There are two dry slices of rye bread for each man and 

woman, and one for each child that cries for more. 
And the time between coming and going is less than the 

space a priest prays till the bells rings and he raises 

the Host on high. 
And out in the night of Belgium, in bursting shells God's 

bells announce another midnight mass. 

March 2, 1916. 



THE SHRINE n 



THE SHRINE 



There is a cross roads somewhere in Belgium where the 

shells have made a shambles of stone and of mortar. 
They have pitted the earth with a pestilence of fire and 

steel, and they have not spared the roads and trees 

that marched with them. 
They have dammed and defiled the flow of rivers where 

women laved linen in sunlight. 
Only a shrine is left at the crossways where a Virgin still 

holds her scarred child in her hands. 

Her eyes are wide and wistful with old agonies of some 

sculptor of earth's dark ages. 
Her lips are dumb as the driven heart of the woman 

kneeling before her. 
Her child looks down on the martyred body of this child 

that war is making a mother, 
With the wild eyes of dumb beasts that suffer and go mad, 

and the sick smile of a soul men murdered in the 

night. 

The girl kneels in the mud of the road and the crumbling 

mortar. 
The rain beats on her bare head and splashes the salt 

tears that trickle down her cheeks. 



12 WAR FLAMES 

Her eyes are fixed on the Virgin's eyes in an agony of dumb 
despair and of desperate hope deferred. 

She is waiting for a miracle of help and of healing, in a 
land whose only miracle is the courage that bears 
despair and still lives to struggle on. 

February 12, 19 16. 

SOEUR CECILE 

Sixty-two years of prayer and placidness had folded her 

hands before her, 
And lowered her eyes and her eyelids like dim lamps 

behind sanctuaries. 
The Prioress who preceded her had clipped her hair that 

fell close to her feet at eighteen, 
Seeing the shining length of a serpent of gold flaming in 

Eden and severed from her head for a moment, 
And the girl bowed her maimed head and prayed sobbing 

for peace, because a lover with his lies had maimed 

her heart. 

Forty-four years she was wasting away to a wraith of 
faith in a cell whose key she had cast away. 

War opened the doors of the world to her terribly and 
tumultuously. 

And a thousand women who had died to give her birth 
began to struggle passionately to live again in her, 



SOEUR CECILE 13 

As she plodded with her nuns through the long pilgrimage 

of despair from Malines to La Panne, 
Lifting her eyes in the open to aeroplanes at sunrise, 
And to sterner sanctities of stars shining through shat- 
tered roofs on battered altars and broken bodies of 
men. 

All the world was new to her as war and as wonderful as 

it was terrible. 
And her soul grew as her eyes ranged through wider vistas 

of ruins redeemed by beauty. 
Till there was room for a thousand women wakening and 

quickening in her, 
And for children that ceased to sob as they learned to 

smile back at her. 
Roses began to bloom faintly in her cheeks and lips at a 

creche in La Panne. 
And she found a rosary there with a bead of love in each 

bed that her fingers lingered on furtively, 
As mothers in their spirits' pregnancy bend stealthily to 

kiss the small garments they make. 
And she moved among them smiling, making and mending 

small garments of flesh to the service and glory of 

God. 

July 19, 19 16. 



14 WAR FLAMES 

INFANTRY TRAINING 

On a slice of sand in Belgium between the devil and the 

deep sea her soldiers are drilling, 
Horses come splashing from the waves with their riders 

clamped to them naked and shining like Centaurs. 
A battery of 75s from Creusot rolls through the ruts of its 

leaders toward the firing line near Furnes. 
On the drift line a company of farm lads, road makers, 

street cleaners, begins to fix bayonets. 

Their feet stamp deep in the sand as their flashing steel 

stabs the air and the forms of air that fight with 

them. 
They have swung spade and dung fork, scythe and axe, 

mattock and stone hammer for centuries and their 

sinews are fit for it. 
They have cleaned up muck heaps and middens, manured 

her fields, dug and drained her ditches, swept away 

the wastage of the land since Belgium was, for this. 
And long years and generations in the open under her 

sky leave them at last the last masters of her destiny. 

They are an integral part of her, ready and prepared to 
suffer and survive through all her strivings and suf- 
ferings. 



INFANTRY TRAINING 15 

They stand sweating, breathing deep, clutching with hard 
hands the tools she lends them to grave in the flesh 
and the minds of men her mind and her will to live. 

They stand on her last frontier of life between the sand 
hills and the sea in the sunrise, 

Waiting till the last red wastage of war is swept away to 
till the fields their fathers tilled. 

The tide turns as the sun rises, and the waves come 

marching and flooding farther out of the sea, 
Driving the flotsam and seadrift and the wastage of winds, 

ever farther and farther before them. 
And new companies and older battalions are coming, 

marching and spreading and forming into line behind 

them. 
And the Word locks their ranks at last, and at last they 

are ready. 
And at last they are marching, treading slow and straight 

past this gray sea gate of fate and defeat, 
Into the future of freedom their own hard hands and their 

fathers' hands have measured and made for them. 

March 4, 19 16. 



16 WAR FLAMES 

LA LIBRE BELGIQUE 

Somewhere in Belgium in a cellar three men are at work, 
Inking rollers, setting type, wedging stickfuls and half 

columns of courage into a steel frame on an ink 

stained slab of stone, 
Lit by a dusty dark lantern on a barrel head by a bolted 

door. 

There is nothing definitely distinguished or obviously 

heroic about the voices or the faces of these three 

young men. 
But their eyes have looked death in the face and learned 

to despise him as they all three despise the Germans 

and Germany. 
All the old patient pertinacity of Flanders and Brabant 

that outlived Alva and the Inquisition is indomitable 

in them. 

They go on throwing their type and hammering their 

wedges wearily and alertly. 
And the sound of German guns pounding at Loos, muffled 

by shattered walls and floors in ruins comes down to 

them, 
Mingling with the throw and recoil of the rusty press they 

begin to feed with stained and mildewed pieces of 

paper. 



LA LIBRE BELGIQUE 17 

And the press seems a living thing with a pulse and a voice 
of its own that is Belgium's and the world's. 

Eighty- two times in twenty months this last syllable of 
the creed of freedom for mankind has uttered itself. 

Week after week unfailing this word of Belgium free for- 
ever, has spoken to the starving, the despairing and 
the dying, who in death still hear her voice of victory. 

Brussels, Antwerp, Liege and more than seventy more of 
her towns and cities, were numbered on this new 
honor roll whose type is set in shadows. 

Fifty thousand francs of German promises to pay has not 
yet bought one traitor to the truth of a nation that 
still saves its soul in cellars. 

Week after week they print their pieces of paper that not 
all of Essen's engines, not all the shells and swords 
forged on fires lit since time began, can blot out or 
obliterate. 

December 12, 19 16. 



GERMANY 



ENTRAINING 

Dresden's Haupt Banhof clangs like a tunnel bridged and 

roofed by giants. It jubilates. 
A regiment of Saxon jaegers is entraining in two long 

sections. 
The young soldiers are wreathed with flowers; their rifles 

garlanded with roses. 
Women and children bring presents, propitiating war 

with chocolate, sausage, pipes, playing cards, Jugend, 

Simplicisismus, rings and bracelets with blond hair 

in them. 

An oiler elbows through the groups of women clustered 
about car windows. 

A news vendor vociferates of fights on the frontier. He 
tells of the unconscionable and impudent audacity 
of Belgians who resist the Kaiser's armies. 

Men buy papers and pull them apart. They forget their 

mothers and sweethearts utterly. 
At last the order comes that the women must stand back. 
Smiling, sobbing, kissing through windows, waving their 

handkerchiefs, cursing the English wildly they begin 

to go. 

21 



22 WAR FLAMES 

The young men loosen their belts and their uniform coats 
of gray green cloth like mullen leaves. 

They drink their girls' healths in station beer and kimmel 
from pocket flasks. 

They light their sweethearts' cigarettes as the train hangs 
fire. 

A half hour passes and after that another endless half hour. 

On the cars Zum Paris is chalked in straggling script 

between the Prussian flags and Saxon colors. 
The young men begin to think of the city of pleasure and 

the women waiting there for them. 
They start to tell lewd stories as the dregs of life that war 

is stirring, eddy upwards. 
They boast and they lie of loves they never knew and never 

hoped to know before. 

Suddenly a slow tremor stirs the long train. The ma- 
chinery moving smoothly before it and behind, has 
shifted to a new impetus of departure. 

The men's hearts stir with it and leap to delight in the 
glory of war. 

Rifle barrels crowned with helmets appear at crowded 
windows as the wheels begin to turn. 

And the noise of engines and wheels is drowned in the 

sound of the shouting that rises and quickens as the 

train moves faster and faster. 

June q, 1915. 



THE REGIMENT 23 

THE REGIMENT 

It moves like a link in the chain of steel that fifty years 

have forged for Prussia. 
It goes clanking over the hills toward the coal and iron 

lands of France and Belgium. 
There is iron in the heavy hobnailed boots that hammer 

the ground at each stride, 
There are tubes of steel and keys to destruction that shift 

and threaten with each lunge of the lumbering 

shoulders. 
The helmets are metal spiked. There is steel in the officers' 

swords and the Teuton truculence of their thoughts 

and their orders. 

It is a link in the chain of steel that drags with it the huge 

mortars and the massive machinery of murder that 

Essen evolves. 
And it functions forward faster in the organic growth of 

steel and the will of steel that imposes new laws 

upon earth. 
And the ripple that runs through it is one with the stir 

of tides and the thud of the blood through men's 

hearts to today's consummation. 
And it surges over the hills to the day when a spray of 

steel shall sweep in a storm of fire from the sea to the 

mountains. 



24 WAR FLAMES 

The men's faces are hard and wire drawn like their 

straining muscles under the torsions of their 

toiling. 
They spell the will of a race that has waked too late and 

finds the earth occupied and fenced from it. 
They strain with the convulsive straining of brutes 

that lunge at the walls of the corral that surrounds 

them. 
They set with the cold conceit of men who say they 

can batter their way with dynamite and melenite 

through all barriers that the mind of man has 

set up. 

Something stronger than steel lives within them and 
thrusts them on with each breath that they draw and 
each beat of their hearts. 

It is more than the will to live in the creed of their philoso- 
phers of force and of f rightfulness. 

It is more than the sense that self is supreme in a world 
of force that makes of their nation a more monstrous 
and menacing ego. 

It is more than their slow and deep drinking and swine 
eating sensuality that wakes from its welter of women 
in Berlin, and turns to war as man's work. 

It is the will of the world to grow that evolves its types, 
and tests them turn by turn in the stern and unending 
warfare between matter and spirit. 



THE BATTERY 25 

Gladiators of today, the regiment hammers on its way for 

a day regardless of philosophies. 
They are hungry and thirsty and bone tired. They look 

for nothing more than food, drink and sleep at the 

end of the day's march. 
They are a living weapon that civilization has ; forged 

to break or be broken, but they reck not of 

that. 
They march to meet the sunset and the hard lips whisper 

"wunder short" and soften as they see it. 
One of them as the sun sinks murmurs " Hail, Caesar, we 

who are about to die salute thee." 
And for the space of a second he feels one millionth part 

of the beauty and splendor and terror of life and 

the tragedy his masters and their millions are 

enacting. 

June 15, 1915. 



THE BATTERY 

Six thirty centimeter mortars from Skoda are lurking 

behind a wind break. 
There is a brown wound in the green meadow. A trodden 

path trickles from it. 
Two huge hobnailed boot heels are clicking restlessly 

outside a hidden hole in the ground. 



26 WAR FLAMES 

A bell at the end of a wire rings, and artillery men leap to 

attention, 
A bearded mouth, muttering, translates code words from 

a Taube a mile in the air, 
A boy officer, crouching behind him relays the ranges and 

lateral angles. 

Smiling boys bring shells in wicker crates and instantly 

uncage them. 
Squat thirty centimeter muzzles tilt up to forty-five degrees 

to pound some place unseen and charted precisely. 
Round the neck of one a classicist from Munich has hung 

a yellow wreath of May flowers for sacrifice. 

Today they are high priests of death and hate, and they 

know it and feel it. 

June 2, 19 1 5. 

HEADQUARTERS 

Batteries of rapid fire typewriters drilled all day, are 

relayed through the night. 
Telephone wires focus here in the army's brain like nerves 

in the ear of a man, 
Sweating telegraphists are swiftly translating sounds in 

a secret code into legible sight, 
In the map room four staff officers are constantly shifting 

colored pins from square to square on their chess 

board. 



HEADQUARTERS 27 

Outside high powered motor cars arrive and depart swiftly 

and with certainty. 
An aeroplane sinks to the ground half a mile to the rear. 

The observer brings his camera swiftly. 
In the dark room, negatives of new enemy positions emerge 

in a new organic growth of the chemistry of thought 

that is hate. 
In an adjutant's office spies are cross-questioned and their 

replies card-catalogued. 

Everywhere there is a sense of machinery moving smoothly 

to adjust itself to shocks. 
The men move like machines. Here and there a twitching 

of nerves nears the breaking point. 
In the field marshal's room a council of war proceeds 

around a long green table. 
One of the younger officers has gambled furiously before 

the war. 
He has come in from the front half dazed with weariness 

and horror. 

Insensibly the group before him fades into the haze around 
a gaming table at Bad Homburg. 

He hears the call of the croupiers and the click of the ball. 
He sees the stakes on the table. 

As he watches, the ball turns to a shell that ex- 
plodes. 



28 WAR FLAMES 

It strews the cloth with dismembered limbs of men and 
broken and bleeding hearts of women. 

And the stacks of bank notes before him become leprous 
scraps of paper pledging the present and future of 
starving nations and generations. 

June 8, 1915. 

TAGS 

Two men kneel in a shell proof dug-out east of the Yser 

canal. 
From the roof a smoking lantern swings and sweats. 
One of them writes with a fountain pen tallying names 

and numbers, 
The other tosses metal tags one by one into a coffin slowly 

filling. 

One by one the rosters of the vanished regiments have 

spelled their passing, 
The sergeant's voice grows raw and numb. It stumbles 

and recovers itself, 
His eyes close and open and confuse the numbers that his 

mouth repeats. 
The captain's head sags and rolls; the pen falls from his 

fingers that grope and clutch and scramble in the 

slime on the floor for it. 
Sometimes a tag falls in the mud there and is buried there. 



TAGS 29 

The tags are tarnished metal with the numbers and letters 

of regiments and the privates' numbers. 
There are brighter bits of aluminum here and there with 

the officers' names and their titles. 
They are pierced and blistered and clipped and chipped 

by bullets, and marred more than any other money 

on earth. 
Some are scored and seared and shattered by shrapnel 

and lydite. 
Some are twisted and hammered and fused together 

indistinguishably like the lives they stand for. 

The sergeant calls and the captain tallies the Kaiser's 

wasted money, 
They call and tally the wasted lives and the world's 

aborted ambitions. 
They call and tally the lost loves and the ceaseless longings 

of women. 
The water seeps into the ooze on the floor and drips from 

timbers overhead as persistently the guns pound on. 
The clinking coffin fills with tags, and the men know that 

tomorrow they must begin again. 
It is a sacrament of murder shared by two blind priests 

in the night. 

June 5, 1915. 



30 WAR FLAMES 

DEATH IN THE AIR 

London lies still and dumb under the night that crouches 

over her, 
High in the sky through mist that hides the stars comes a 

drumming of motors madly whirring in limbo, 
Death and the fear that fills the void of night, are coming 

in new monsters made by man to smite the monster 

city. 

From the most eastern outposts and eyes in air of Eng- 
land's island camp of iron in arms tonight, 

Word is heard and relayed of the raid that arrives, and her 
millions awake and make them ready, 

Marksmen and mothers all in their places, standing wait- 
ing, pale and still and patiently implacable. 

High in the sky through mist that melts, the huge war 

vulture's wings are whirling, spiraling above the 

city's circuit. 
And a searchlight shaft like God's forefinger, followed by 

another and yet others, moves groping through the 

void and pointing toward the drone of death in 

darkness. 
And the eyes and hearts of the millions below are moving, 

mounting and sinking with it as their parted lips and 

straining lungs are moving. 



DEATH IN THE AIR 31 

Now in the zenith a Zeppelin dragged from the dark like 
some small silvery cocoon of horror that never shall 
loose one wasp of hate to hurt the earth, 

Hangs in full sight in the night as the shrapnel's pale 
inverted hail begins to pelt and beat about it. 

And a surf of sound that shakes and rends the sky with 
bursting steel is thundering and rising round it. 

Prisoned and impaled by light, this last war dragon of the 
Rheingold's hoarders, hovers quivering in its vortex 
in the void, 

Forming a focus of hate for the swift-stabbing of steel 
destruction, stealing closer, rending ether on all 
sides at once. 

So the cave men of Mercia and France once fought the 
last flying sea-lizards in their air at night with torches, 
javelins, raw flints from slings and flaming arrows. 

And still it hangs, the pale storm center of a cyclone of 

ruin that, rending night, has whirled its mates away 

from it. 
And from all sides boy aviators on their war birds with 

their bullets and their bombs come closing in and 

bearing down on it, 
And like a sentient living thing it seems to sense their 

coming and to shiver as it staggers raggedly and 

dips and sags. 



32 WAR FLAMES 

All the eyes of London now are feeling it falling or about 
to fall, 

All the mind and might of England and her farthest out- 
posts of the earth and air have willed its fall and 
destined it. 

All the old embittered brute that hides in steel, the far 
inflated pride, the cynic science God let Germany 
reveal, no more one second can sustain it. 

For now He sows His spores of life and death, and freedom 
and blind slavery for men and monsters more and less 
than men, on air and all her currents. 

And all the hopes and hates and horrors of the score of 
Prussians pitching and reeling there avail no more 
to stay or save, than blood drops dripping from one 
butchered baby's brain five thousand feet below. 

And the warm breath of London's millions still exhales 
in vortices of fire and steel; and suddenly that silvery 
cocoon of hate and death is falling flaming. 

And from stressed lips and houses hoarse and heaving, on 
the streets below, rises a roar that jubilating swells to 
joy to earth tomorrow, that tonight all London's 

millions madly know. 

January 13, 19 17. 



ATROCITIES 33 



ATROCITIES 

Into Belgium in a gray green flood the marching regiments 
are pouring. 

They sweep with the surge of a tidal wave filling and wreck- 
ing villages and cities. 

For behind them a void of greed and hatred has been 
stirred as the sea stirs when volcanoes vomit from the 
ocean's bottom. 

And old and abysmal shames and horrors are spewed from 
the slime of sixty sunken centuries. 

An old man hangs and drips from fifty wounds at a cross 

., roads sign post. 
Bodies of boys butchered and tortured are charring in 

the smoking ashes of a hundred houses. 
A nun stripped and raped and maddened runs screaming 

through a forest. 
A mother clutching her hungry baby swoons on her bed 

with both her breasts hacked off. 

A red cross nurse, the cords of both hands cut, hugging 
an eyeless child plods on interminably toward Lou- 
vain. 

Five little girls, fingerless and handless, fall fainting and 
dying around an altar in a ruined church. 



34 WAR FLAMES 

A priest with his finger nails and his tongue torn forth lies 
quivering on the floor in the form of a cross. 

A Belgian soldier hangs writhing crucified on the door by 
German bayonets. 

They have mangled the souls of the murderers and tor- 
turers as well as those of the sufferers. 

They have distorted their minds and wrecked their wills 
as a bursting shell wrecks and distorts the broken 
body of a man. 

They have mangled and distorted the mind and the soul 
of a nation in its day of wrath and judgment. 

For the bottom of a sea of obscene consciousness has been 
heaved into sight. 

And things inhuman and hidden have been hurled from 
the night into the knowledge of men that made them. 

VIVISECTION 

God whose mind made men and Germans must be German 
minded too at times, 

He has vivisected brutes, evolving men from truceless 
unrelenting wars of fang and talon. 

So He tortured dogs and guinea pigs in Germany, Rome, 
London, Paris, Petrograd, two years ago: 

Out of agonies of ages made His modern miracles of Sur- 
gery and science specialized. 



VIVISECTION 35 

Out of suppurating flesh of beasts today, distilled His anti- 
toxins for all time's despairs: 

Out of syphilis fashioned Ehrlich, and new healing for all 
nations. 

He who lesser lives devotes forever to an iron service, 

From His soldiers' gangrened flesh in France sublimes a 
surer cure for every gangrened horror in man's hands 
and heart. 

He has vivisected smaller lives in Belgium, Serbia, Poland. 
German soldiers spiked their babies on red bayonets and 

held them writhing high in air for all the world to 

see; 
For earth's cynics, slaves and wasters, business men and 

idle women, poets, children, to envision and inherit. 
German scientists once showed school children pasteboard 

boxes filled with lepidoptera spiked on pins in ranks. 
Red efficiency that rips house walls like pasteboard, chloro- 
forms a butterfly lest downy wings be tarnished as 

they die; 
But it has no anaesthetics for these Belgian babies stabbed 

and shell-torn while its German Herods' wounds are 

waiting. 

He who in his scale of Kosmos sees all Germany one mil- 
limeter larger than one Belgian baby; 
Vivisects today and always, not his lesser lives alone: 



36 WAR FLAMES 

Vivisects not flesh and blood and nerve of France and 
England, Russia, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey, Italy, 
and Germany only; but their mind and spirit. 

And the center of that map of pain and torture table for 
the world holds Germany today in torment for the 
rest. 

Winter is the white-robed surgeon and the titan vivisector 
numbing all things but the body's brutish shrinking 
in his hands. 

Winter numbs the mob. Behind him lurks the fear of lives 
tubercular and starved, breeding and feeding in filth 
and weakness, where once was full-fleshed force for- 
ever and forever. 

February 21, 191 6. 

SHADOWS 

The shadows gather hovering like vultures' wings over a 
land whose soul lies dying. 

They breed in knit brows, around tightened lips where 
teeth flashed and eyes gleamed once in love and laugh- 
ter and delight. 

They grow in the grime of the trenches, in stagnant ditches 
of shade till a shell bursts, scattering a nest of horror, 
hurled in the eye of the sun. 

They spread in widening mourning bands and broader 
borders on letters and printed cards of mourning. 



SHADOWS 37 

They gather in deeper hollows under the eyes of war 

worn women and hungry children. 
They flow into new made graves of young and old, and the 

clods that fall on them cannot bury them nor dam 

their spread, 
They are grim in the grayer faces of the Kaiser and his 

older generals. 

They pollute the earth at Essen under new monster idols 

of hate that the hands of men have hewed from steel. 
They ripple in every wave on German coasts with the 

menace of death from the sea that is to come. 
They are sealed in violin cases and silent grand pianos, 

black coffins and mordant sarcophagi of the soul of 

harmony that Germany destroys. 
They lurk in the chemists' empty and dusty test tubes 

like the black microbes of murder that another's 

frenzy of frightfulness devises. 
They lurk in a slow necrosis of knowledge and nobility 

in all her lecture halls and class rooms of service to 

the world. 
They breed in the hearts and brains of millions of men and 

women once happy and human. 
They fester in the souls of spies and police and all who pay 

them; they are black in the secret printings, plottings 

and slayings of revolt that rises and strikes in the 

dark. 



38 WAR FLAMES 

They sway in the sunlight where weeds grow and men 
wither in neglected gardens, 

They have made a vast cobble-stoned parade ground 
a thing of beauty in the summer, with the growth of 
grain there. 

For out of horror comes hope and subtle shiftings of the 
weight of stone and steel that has made of Germany 
today the world's huge prison house. 

They fall on empty aisles and shrouded counters of shops 
of sudden surfeit where facile waste lies sacrificed to 
vaster waste. 

They hover round single lights in dim alcoves of lust and 
luxury, like memories in the minds of starving prosti- 
tutes of days and nights of love devouring. 

For her cities have grown old in a year, and her soldier lads 
and girl nurses and war brides of hunger and hopeless- 
ness shall never in all God's years be children again. 

The shadows gather around the minds of men who have 
planned for war persistently as they have made its 
munitions, and caused these things to be. 

They gather in the corners of roofless hangars and railroad 
stations and storehouses where the air bombs of the 
allies have exploded. 

They gather in empty galleries of mines where the steel 
strength and the vital fuel of the nation and the slice of 
earth she stole are spent as her human strength is spent. 



SHADOWS • 39 

They gather and grow and stain the whitest walls in the 

halls of huge hospitals and crude clearing houses of 

torment, deformity and death. 
They gather and hover over the fields where air ships fly 

to darken the days and the nights of women working 

there. 

For the flame of life that blazed abroad there in the center 
of Europe and fused her strength to steel and the 
bursting of bombs that eviscerate earth itself, begins 
to fall. 

The shadows grow and the cinders choke it wherever a 
fire burns and a light fails in an empire of emptiness 
grown old and cold and crumbling over night. 

For this Germany has had her hour in the sun in the sight 
of East and West, and the eyes of gods and devils 
that her War-lord makes of men. 

For this red harvest of slayers all earth has devised and 
toiled for, through ages of evolution that makes man 
more and less than utter brute; 

Till in the charted courses of stars and all recurrent tides 
and seasons, men and women may walk forth freely 
in the light again for the renewing of the earth. 

February 16, 19 16. 



40 WAR FLAMES 



ESSEN 

More than seven score thousand men are toiling there 

at Essen, 
Working day and night in double shifts in haste infuriate, 
Round blast furnaces that roaring flare and stab the air 

with fear at midnight. 
Tilting crucibles are pouring molten steel like hydra's 

hair to sear the shadows. 
Fiery serpents fall and flame along the moulds and slowly 

lapse to torpor. 

Where they toil in desperation they are shaping sorrow 

there at Essen. 
While they cast shell casings, drill truncated cylinders for 

monster mortars that they put together; 
While they prime time fuses, file machine gun gears and 

rake their bores with circling rifling; 
They are welding will to chains of steel that only steel as 

strong shall ever sever. 
Into bullets and to shrapnel they are crystallizing ruin. 

They are casting loss and havoc. Huge steel billets are 
the devil's dice of death at Essen. 

And their crucibles devouring are his ladles that all Ger- 
many have gutted. 



ESSEN 41 

Into them they cast the riches of their mines and the steel 

strength of cities, 
Casting faster all their cattle, all the growth of grain and 

earth's abundance; 
All the frenzied flesh of soldiers, old men, boys, defectives, 

weaklings, maniacs marched to battle. 

They have cast the hearts and hopes and long despairs of 
women there at Essen. 

These they crushed to crimson welter, flayed and shredded 
where triphammers tirelessly are falling clanging. 

There they fuse their prayers and tears and fears 
that stab them as the pangs of child birth stab 
them. 

There they cast the glorious years of all that Germany for 
music won and science. 

There they cast their mutilated sanctities that fright- 
fulness and force might triumph. 

They cast honor there disowned, and all the lies that 

wasted, wait to wound them there at Essen. 
Toiling to uproot the earth and righteousness and freedom 

with a madman's ammunition, 
Seeking to o'ershadow sunlight with their Zeppelins and 

turn back tides with submarine torpedoes. 
All that suns and tides have wrought since earth was fire 

must war against them. 



42 WAR FLAMES 

Maddened, reeling, Germany is whirling east and west 
and north and south as armies eat her substance. 

And the vortex of her ruin is this town of soot and steel 
where naked workmen 

Fight with fire and fail, as fail the gun crews in the turret 
of a Dreadnaught mined and sinking. 

June 12, 1915. 



POISONED WELLS 

Somewhere in Africa south of the line. there is heat haze 

on interminable plains. 
And the dust devils dance there drunkenly and sun 

struck. 
In the dongas and clefts of the rocks the shade shrinks 

inch by inch and hour by hour, 
Where the vipers lie and sun themselves, and little 

lizards flicker in and out of the light alertly and 

unheard. 

There is no sound here at noon but the minute ripple and 

plash of sand grains wind swept and pitching from the 

fringe of the well, 
And the interminable buzzing of clouds of flies settling 

and gorging, and rising from the bodies of a black 

woman and her boy and baby girl, 



POISONED WELLS 43 

Naked and starved, bloated and festering, and grinning 
in the ghastliness of ultimate and intolerable torments. 

And above, black against the blue, vultures hover, as they 
hover over every sky in Europe today with eyes like 
the eyes in the Taubes and Zeppelins. 

November 1, 1916. 



FRANCE 



THE SIDING 

The long train stumbles panting down the long siding and 

starts to drink. 
Side doors fly open with the massed precision of rifle 

breeches in line unlocking. 
Men come flying out of third class carriages suddenly 

as empty shells are ejected, 
And the impact of feet on the earth thuds like the sound of 

a thousand gun butts grounding arms. 

The white dust of Champagne powders bare heads and 

baggy red trousers. 
It gets into throats that have choked in the desert and 

throttled down thirst like a beast. 
Women who have watched the rest pass, have stood all 

day waiting for the Zouaves from the South. 
Willing to bear hunger and heat, longing to give all that 

they have, be it never so little. 

It is the season of fruits and there are early apples, rasp- 
berries, blackberries, melons and plums, 

Cider hoarded from last year, cows' milk and goats' milk, 
syrups, grosaille and grenadine, 

47 



48 WAR FLAMES 

And everywhere there is wine as red as the blood of France 

that spills itself as freely, 
And some, who have nothing more to give, have baked 

their apronfuls of bread and dumbly follow the 

others. 

And the poorest and richest of all and the smallest children. 

give flowers away; 
Crimson poppies, blue cornflowers and daisies, tied into 

little living tricolor cockades. 
And the men from the desert eye the children and the 

flowers with a wistful and childlike wonder. 
And they smile as the children smile at something strange 

and beautiful in France that has flowered by this 

siding of life. 

July 8, 19 16. 

THE ROSE GARDEN 

There is an old rose garden on the frontier that the 

French won back. 
It lies hidden on a hillside behind a burned and ruined 

chateau. 
Charred and crumbling stumps alone remain of the groves 

that rose around it, 
Between them rude crosses, roughly carved, mark the 

graves of fallen soldiers. 



BLOOD TRANSFUSION 49 

The roses flame in the blaze of June and their fragrance is 

fused with sunshine. 
Bees have found them and drunken with fragrance they 

cling to them. 
Butterflies hover above them like flowers of the air that 

float on the wind. 
A soldier fresh from the filth of trenches lies asleep in the 

shadow where the grass grows long. 

The shadow crawls across the sun dial in the center from 

hour to hour. 
The rose petals fall on the sleeper and he stirs and smiles 

in his sleep. 
Four of his comrades, finger to lip, come and cover 

him from head to foot with a riot of red blossoms. 
And he dreams of the souls of the dead women of France 

whose dust has made these roses splendid and 

inviolate. 

June 13, 1915. 



BLOOD TRANSFUSION 

Two arms rest side by side on a bed in a base hospital at 

Compiegne. 
His is knotted and brown and bound with a bandage at 

the wrist, 



50 WAR FLAMES 

Hers is smooth and white and fresh as her face and her 

youth is fresh, 
And the bright blood running through the transfusion 

tube that is testing them. 

He lies like an inert muscle of France strained and spent 

beyond rest, beyond stirring or sensation. 
She is still and she smiles as a mother smiles when her 

first born baby is laid on the bed beside her. 
Out of her brave heart beats a tide that rises renewing 

the ruins of a nation, 
Out of her youth revives the blood that flowed to make 

the soil of France forever priceless. 

This is the only marriage that today's martyrdom has 
left her. 

For her lovers and her brothers have marched and died 
from Dunkirk to the Dardanelles. 

Her arms are empty but her soul is full and satisfied be- 
yond words or seeing or feeling, 

And she smiles in ecstasy as she smiled when she first 
shared in the broken body of God before the altar 

Hers is the body and the soul of love in a sacrament that 

giving and sharing fulfills itself. 
And she lives as her mother lived when life flowed freely 

from her breasts into the lips and the growing life 

of her daughter. 



THE DECORATION 51 

She is more than herself, she is more than France, she is 

life and the handmaid of life that in dying is deathless. 

And each line of her lips is a line of a new Magnificat 

sung in mercy, in silence transcendent. 

August 26, 1915. 

THE DECORATION 

Flat-capped Chasseurs Alpins, blue devils of Hartmanns- 

weiler's Kopf, surround the square. 
The houses are old and gray and austere as the aging 

faces beneath them. 
Some one has hung a Tricolor from the third floor of the 

tallest house. 
It hangs motionless in mild sunlight like the ribbon honor 

pins on the breast of her bravest soldiers. 

Drums roll: from the Avenue de la Gare, Joffre and two 
Generals advance. 

He moves slowly. Men salute. Some stare as they still 
stare when God's high priest holds high His body. 

In the center round an altar intangible and real the crip- 
ples are ranged, 

They grip their crutches like swords of honor. A souPs 
life-time in each looks out of eyes of France expectant. 

Joffre takes each token, each broken bit of God's body to 

day in France. 
Slowly he passes along the line, and kisses each man on 

both cheeks as he passes. 



52 WAR FLAMES 

And all the love and fealty of France that she gave to her 
priests and their God once, goes from him and comes 
back to him. 

And all the loyalty of France to flesh made strong by suf- 
fering shows in the face of a soldier's widow standing 
watching. 

Her children are standing beside her wide eyed and won- 
dering. 

This is a day and an hour in the life of boy and girl that 
never can be forgotten; 

God's decoration of the grayness of young lives already 
used to suffering, that long must suffer on. 

For their brother lies last of all on an army cot, a slender 
lad of twenty with both legs shot away. 

He sits bolt upright and salutes precisely as the great 

general pauses beside him, 
And his breast swells and his heart beats fast as the gray 

face comes close to his own gray face. 
France, you may pin sparse tokens with war-tried fingers 

to breasts that lift beneath eyes that look to you 

living and dying, 
But the decoration you have set in these faces belongs to 

millio.is that march and that serve you still, living 

or dead. 

February 15, 1916. 



THE PRISON CAMP 53 



THE PRISON CAMP 

The tree tops wave and the shadows slip through the close 

strands of the mile-long fence of barbed wire ten feet 

high. 
The wind comes and goes with the spicy scents of the pine 

woods on three sides of the camp. 
On the fourth side is a sandy plain where the sun is setting 

over England, France and Belgium. 
Men's eyes follow it and turn back to the guard 

houses with their machine guns that grin at 

them. 

Over the camp the clouds float and the birds fly, and their 

shadows fall on regular rows of toy-like barracks in 

the center. 
Inside these the Prussian passion for soulless order has 

satiated itself. 
They have regulated the food and drink of their captives 

to the last gram and cubic centimeter. 
They have regulated the hours of their sleeping and rising, 

of their eating and drinking, of their sweeping and 

making their beds. 
They have regulated their gait and their gestures 

when an officer or sub-officer approaches or 

passes. 



54 WAR FLAMES 

They have regulated the amount of their mail, the cubic 
feet of air they breathe at night, and the square feet 
of the earth's surface they may tread upon. 

But they cannot regulate the thoughts they think, the 
dreams they dream and the strong hunger of their 
starving souls. 

The men are thin, they walk slowly, they speak 
in low tones and unconsciously conserve their 
strength. 

The regular rows of huts and the even strands of wire are 
like the bars of a grate where a fire burns low. 

The life in them burns and burrows into itself and con- 
sumes itself with the everlasting patience of a living 
flame. 

And the red grays, cinders fall, weakness dies, but the 
strength in them survives through endless months 
and days and nights of torment eternal. 

August 2, 1915. 



THE ARIA 

The Pantheon's shadow creeps across the sacred hill, still 

closer to St. Etienne. 
Little black shadows of the war in Paris cross the square 

to vespers in the older church. 



THE ARIA 55 

They enter one by one, and one by one they buy and light 

their candles to St. Genevieve. 
Inside her shrine they breathe the gray quiet of this urn 

of stone that hides her spirit's ashes. 

The church stands tall and tranquil from the floor where 

Pascal sleeps, to the clerestory's benediction of stone 

fingers framed in light. 
It is a sermon shaped and spoken perfectly in stone; in 

pavement, pillar, wall and capital and architrave 

and groining. 
It is a house where prayers come home to brood about its 

columns, till flying forth, they bear God's messages 

to multitudes that wait outside. 
It is the heart of hope and pain for France, that 

centuries before this war have made for France to 

live in. 

France rouses from her midday trance of silence and the 

shadows here in Paris. 
From western windows light comes flaming red and falls 

like blood that drips down old gray walls. 
And the dead dust of Pascal and Racine wakes and is 

shaken by the organ's surf of sound, 
By changing colors of the lights, choiring voices and 

faces, and the smoke of incense woven in and wafted 

out of it. 



56 WAR FLAMES 

The organ surges to a storm and through it, and subsides 
in rolling swells that barely rise and fall. 

Then like a silver fountain in the sunlight gushing heaven- 
ward, suddenly an aria reveals itself. 

And the pure sexless tones of the boy's heart are lifted 
past the rood loft with its crucifix above the choir. 

And they soar and they hang in air, till people looking up 
and past all walls and vaulting see and hear their 
heroes: 

Jean d'Arc, Ste. Genevieve, Du Guescelin, Roland, 
Bayard, Jean Bart, and Ste. Clothide; 

All the old Pantheon of soldier souls of men and women 
who have fought and lived and died for France are 
here. 

With them are lesser saints and sinners sublimated to this 
single voice of promise in the air, 

Too true to live on earth; too transient to be touched, but 
by one single heart beat of the war worn heart of 
France that thrills and triumphs hearing it. 

March 27, 1916. 



BESIDE THE MARNE 57 



BESIDE THE MARNE 



There are great blue gray circles where the Germans 
burned their dead like brands on the flesh of France. 

There are scattered graves, and graves in ranks, and long 
trenches where the buried treasure of the ages lives. 

And around them the peasants are already beginning to 
plow and sow and forget. 

There are bare wooden crosses and crosses covered with 

rusty cuirassiers' helmets. 
There are crosses covered with faded forage caps with 

holes in them. 
There are fresh cut crosses of granite with shining French 

and Latin inscriptions. 

Her soldiers lie thickest following the trenches and parallel 
furrows that the plow of war has turned. 

They lie in scattered windfalls where the great mother of 
tomorrow still sows as she strides. 

And all her sons and daughters of France still see her on 
every letter that they live to write. 

Here where she turned in her stride toward the Rhine at last, 
Here where the flood from the East began to turn at full 

tide, 
Here where the storm of steel that pierced her breast drove 

deepest, there lies a lonely grave by the highway. 



58 WAR FLAMES 

Tomorrow men may build monuments here, millions 

shall come through all time to wonder and breathe 

deep. 
Today he lies where he fell, her last sentinel of freedom 

on the shaking soil of France. 
And the peasant prays for him as he passes with his plow, 

breaking the body of France that the dead today 

share here with the living. 

August 4, 1915. 

ALSACE, 19 15 

Once more the land smiles in the sun of a cloudless and 

radiant September, 
Once more school begins and the mothers come 

smiling, bringing their children hand in hand with 

them. 
Once more Alsace that was dumb so long has found its 

voice and the voice of France that loves it. 

This is the lost child of the nation that they are bringing 

back to the little white school house with the tricolor 

floating above it. 
The floors are swept and Poincare and Joffre look down 

from the walls to give the children welcome. 
And around the walls of each room runs a frieze of flowers 

of white, of azure and crimson. 



ALSACE, 191 5 59 

There are two rooms and two teachers, one a nun and 

the other a one-armed soldier. 
They stand in their uniforms of service that gives itself 

as freely as the light and the air and the soil of France 

are given to men. 
And they smile and the woman opens wide her arms as 

she sees her children coming home to her. 

Fifty pairs of little wooden sabots come and drum along 

the hard white road that leads to the new life love 

won back. 
Fifty pairs of eyes look gravely at the frieze of flowers and 

the grave eyes of JofTre and Poincare, 
Fifty pairs of ears listen eagerly to the simplest syllables 

of a tongue that still is strange to them. 

They see its letters shining white and precise in the copies 

prepared on the blackboards. 
They hear the grace and the Latin candor of a language 

that is still man's countersign of freedom. 
And something they feel lifting them, holding their hearts, 

like the swelling crescendo of a mighty symphony 

that softly has begun to sound. 



60 WAR FLAMES 

And the mothers slowly walk away, some smiling, some 

weeping for the past and their men still in the battle 

line; 
Out of their birth in exile they have brought their flesh 

and blood to France and the birth of a new sacrament 

of sorrow and redemption. 
And the beauty that lies on their lips and their brows is a 

beauty beyond the bride's and the mother's whose 

child turns back to her from dying. 

Last to go are the gray grandmothers who have seen the 
third generation born to sorrow awake to light. 

They have seen their sons and their daughters dying in 
doubt and dread, and the false and the feeble forget- 
ting France and the voice of France. 

And the light in their tired eyes is a living benediction, and 
the light in the eyes of the oldest mother of all who 
holds her own once more. 

September 6, 1915. 

THE PLANE AND THE SHADOW 

It rises still in wider gyres a gyroscope of man's survival 

in the infinite. 
In the spinning of the motors is the spinning of the 

thing that spirals ever through the ether and 

eternitv. 



THE PLANE AND THE SHADOW 61 

And the mind that found and framed it in the darkness 
under earth and sea is soaring here. 

And the brute that builds in blackness and in blindness 
rises with it, clogging, clinging to the life that leaps 
beyond, and casts its shadow far below. 

Its two motors clamor, singing the strong song of man 
that mounts and soars before the stars, 

With a thin persistent ringing, rising far above the roar of 
guns that pour red floods of blood and fire from moun- 
tain summits back to sea again; 

Flinging farther still its strident challenge till the storms 
with fire tipped talons and white flutterings of league- 
long wings drive down on it. 

And the planes are white with snow, and the stays snatch 
feathers from the frost as the pale plane drives on 
beyond the snow squall. 

And the lightnings strike and stab at it and it evades them 
as it swerves and mounts through shrapnel bursting 
white a mile below. 

And its pulse of flame beats on alone in space at last. 

It has passed the storms, and vibrates high in air as a 

strong singer dwells in C in alt. a breathing space. 
Something in the pilot's frost paled face that pulses, swells 

beyond the minor and material cares and fears of 

earth; 



62 WAR FLAMES 

AH the testing and repairing and refitting of the engine 

parts and rivets that have fixed and focussed life 

sublimed for centuries to hover here. 
From the burly gray observer's stolid heart to his square 

hands there wells a worship momently transcending, 
Ah the pin points on his scraps of maps where men with 

lusts of brutes and brains of demi-gods wrest life to 

death, contending for two blood and smoke stained rags. 
And the plane still droning quivers high in sky, while 

thousands die by Verdun, as a singer of man's soul 

may hold a splendid C in alt. 

As the singer's soul and breast must lapse to take in 
breath, the plane descending breathes to earth again. 

And the pilot wipes his frost flaked glasses free from rime 
as sunlight melts the snow film on his planes. 

And he tunes his motor truer, as the grim observer moves 
his rolling map, and shifts the focus of field glasses 
that he sights as once he sighted guns. 

All the cunning of generations of master gunners that 
bred him, drives his eyes, like a pointer's eyes to 
snipe, to fix and map his guns; finding and counting 
them by flashes. 

All the old skill and balance of brain of Breton helmsmen 
and Norman riders lives in the younger flight lieuten- 
ant who rides his currents of air and swerves from 
bursting shells like spray swept rocks. 



THE PLANE AND THE SHADOW 6$ 

For the Purpose that raised and held them high in air to 
hark for one heart beat to the infinite that maps man's 
destiny, has ste ner work for them. 

And it sways them spiraling at lower levels, each a specific 
and specialized part of the growth whose spores are 
stars today fulfilled in them. 

And out of the reek and horror of war made redder by in- 
struments of murder more precise, a Vision of man in 
Space is forming, 

And a Voice from the ether comes crashing to the swarm- 
ing of ions and electrons trained to serve, as the 
wireless telephones its truth to nerves in ears 
below. 

And now the map of a minute of time is made and the 
biplane turns to France as a homing hawk turns with 
food for its nest. 

And the black eagles are up and out to cut it off and kill it, 
and Fokker, Taube and Albatross come towering 
towards it. 

And Taube and Albatross fall; but the Fokker fal- 
con rises towering, spiraling high and higher 
still. 

And the biplane mounts to meet it, charting the spiral 
curve of life in space, and starting to fall as the petrol 
in the tank falls and blood drips from the driver's 
body. 



64 WAR FLAMES 

And the Fokker banking steeply dives from a precipice of 
air where eyes of hate look down on death, raining 
in an inverted vortex, a widening cone and hail of 
steel that sweeps its path. 

And the biplane turns with the last essence in its tanks and 
the last ounce of dripping energy in the pilot's hands 
and heart, to meet machine gun with machine gun 
and death with death full tilt. 

All the old fury and frenzy of Norman riders in tilt yards 
and tournaments and stricken fields won or lost past 
hope or fear, sustains him now: 

All the old keenness of sight and fine coordinate function- 
ing of Pictic archers, and gunners that Napoleon 
ennobled, live in his comrade as the machine gun 
band breaks off its beads of sound. 

All the old faith of their fathers that battled through St. 
Bartholomew and outlasted La Rochelle, is life for 
France in this rosary of fire in the air. 

And now the guns below have ceased, and on two sectors 
of trenches thousands on both sides are looking up 
in tensing silence that is prayer today. 

For now is the moment supreme beyond all triumph or 
defeat where life lives on its throne of judgment, 
poising swaying scales of peril in the air. 



THE LAVOIR 65 

And the thousands staring up are seeing man that fights 

to light and freedom, grappling with another shade 

of night. 
And the shadow of the Fokker falling on their upturned 

faces is the shadow of the brute that lurks at each 

man's shoulder, clogging flight forever; 
Of the Brute that lusts and hates and builds, and drives 

man on to ride the winds to wrest night's shadow 

from her: 
And ever goads him from his triumphs over time and 

space, to tenser struggling in abysses where his 

shadow plumbs himself. 



March 6, 19 16. 



THE LAVOIR 



Two years ago ten women washed a town's stained linen 
on these stones. 

And they beat its grayness white in running water flashing 
bright, and flowing to the Loire and to the Ocean. 

The March winds shook snow flurries out like suds, and 
whipped gray skies that dried to fluttering, white, 
curling clouds at last. 

April wrung out the sap through the gray boughs of apple 
trees that blossomed white above the bleaching linen. 

And the petals fell and floated down on girls' dark hair and 
laughing faces looking up, and on the lights and shad- 
ows gliding through the sliding water. 



66 WAR FLAMES 

And the apple petals were rosy as the wind-whipped faces 
of the girls; and some were tainted in their April 
beauty with a blight as old as earth. 

Claire, the most competent, laundered indifferently, lace 
of her Countess by birth, and the latest Tours prosti- 
tute leasing the villa at Dol for the season. 

And the borders of one bore a coronet, of the others a 
cypher such as one sees interlacing initials of kings 
on the Louvre. 

Between the loud lavishness and intricate luxury of their 
webs of white waste there, Claire could find little to 
choose. 

With her cold fingertips coolly she touched the lost lives of 
these women, the last of their lovers, and brought back 
one whiteness that blindly all women must worship. 

And the touch of white lace like a kiss on warm flesh came 
closer to her as she worked toward the end of her 
task by the river. 

And the river called and flowed by the road, and the wind 
in the trees beckoned, and the drying lace teased her 
as a trailing skirt may tease a kitten. 

Little Angele was washing the broad brassieres trimmed 
with Bruges, of the bourgeoises who cringed to the 
countess and envied the other. 

Little Angele with her one shift a week dreamed dully 
how happy such wonderful women must be. 



THE LA VOIR 67 

Dreamed as a child will of red wine and strawberries and 

huge glossy plums of the Midi that went with their 

white table cloths. 
Margot the hunchback beat savagely camisoles sheer as 

the seven pairs of high clocked silk stockings a week, 

worn by Lucile the tall midinette, flaunting her hat 

shop from Paris. 
Older and coarser women who did the coarser work of the 

town, slaved at their task as they laved its stains 

away. 
And their hands and their faces took a color from the 

grime ground into them. 
Those too old for all but scandal and lies and covetousness, 

told stories that small Angele had lost the grace to 

blush to. 
And Margot's sneer wore towards a fixed mask of hate, 

and Claire grew ever wearier of the torment of her 

task and intolerable longing for a lover she could 

love, who never came. 

Then War the great lover came like the bridegroom in 
the night to the wise virgins and the foolish ones and 
made full trial of them. 

And Margot began to smile from watching other women 
weep, till tears untied at last the black knots of hate 
in her face and heart, in tenderness she never knew 
before. 



68 WAR FLAMES 

And little Angele was aware that all her women's wasted 
linen was white to make bandages for France and 
the wounded soldiers of France, 

And Claire who had always worked for herself and planned 
for herself, forgot her phantom lover, in her love for 
all the men of France that marched and died and were 
maimed and mangled for her. 

The older women went away one by one to men's tasks 
in the town and the fields. 

But the three girls still toiled by the river day by day, 
washing the bed clothes and the bandages black with 
blood and red with blood still bright on their white- 
ness. 

For the countess had given her chateau for a hospital, and 
the prostitute had given her jewels and her motor and 
herself to the service. 

And Claire and Margot and Angele toiled and were stifled 
in the steam of its cellars through the winter. 

And the spring came again, and again they beat their 
linen white by the river on stones that felt the falling 
petals from the swaying apple trees. 



The stones and the river felt her tears that fell as Angele 
knelt there in endless litanies of service for her dead 
who died for France and her. 



THE LA VOIR 69 

And time that stains and whitens all at last, washed the 
color from her face, purged dull pain from Margot's, 
and pride of youth that stands demanding all from 
Claire their fairer sister. 

And the three girls washed their hands and their souls 
as they knelt, in the river that flashed to the sea tak- 
ing all the stains and pains of war along with it. 

Day by day they went their way heaping their baskets 
high with whiter petals of passion and prayer than 
ever fell there from their apple trees on them. 

And they said little, but they sang and whispered softly 
to the murmur of the river, for time and pain had 
made them women as they knelt there. 

Woman who stains the mind of man with little lies, who 
wraps herself in lace-like webs of lust and waste 
around his pilgrim passions; 

Woman whose fingers wring all clinging taints from life; 
who makes herself a still cool bandage and white bed 
of rest for all the wounds and sufferings of souls; 

Woman who kneels wherever rivers flow and fruit trees 
bloom and clouds come white, waiting in light till war 
brings back its heroes' hearts made white to worship her. 

March 11, 1916. 



70 WAR FLAMES 



ROADS IN FRANCE 

They were a network of veins and arteries in the life of 

France that lived and fought for this, 
And a labyrinth of adventuring and a path of pilgrimages 

since the Crusades and before. 
Out of them came the armed strength of France from mine 

to forge, to tiltyard, seaport and the passes of the 

Alps and Pyrenees. 
Out of them, stone by stone, her cathedrals and castles 

arose. 

Out of them seed by seed her farms and gardens flowered 
fairer and spread farther. 

Out of thin meshes, drop by drop, was strained the blood 
that made her beautiful and brave. 

Out of the shimmer of dew and the coolness of their shad- 
ows, her painters mixed a magic calling the world to 
wander here, 

Where two tall rows of poplars marched processional to 
meet the Host in sunrise on the hills. 

Then there were village girls with garments gay as their 
cheeks and lips that men kissed in shadowy corners, 

Tourists in motors making each roadside inn a rest house 
of happiness halting at noon and at night, 



ROADS IN FRANCE 71 

Teams of five horses in line hauling huge trucks of soft 

white stone for the sawing, 
Abbes in black on women's bicycles worming through 

white flocks of sheep. 

Now the abbes, shepherds, horses and motors have been 

mobilized. 
The girls go in black; their faces are pale and children have 

cried when they kissed them. 
The inns are empty and the roads are lonely, north, south 

and west and in the heart of France. 
They are worn as bare as the threadbare seams in the 

garments of people that pass on them. 

Eastward they are rutted and crowded with motor lorries 
and motor busses. 

Long columns of troops march past ranks of crosses close 
by the side of the road. 

Past shell torn stumps of trees that stand like monuments 
of a million amputations, 

Till they come to the zone of fire where the shells are fall- 
ing still. 

Here the land is sick, pitted and infected with steel and 
burned with the cautery of a red and ruthless recon- 
quest. 

And the roads of France are ceaselessly bringing fresh blood 
that is dripping still wherever their ends are severed, 



72 WAR FLAMES 

And, foot by foot and mile by mile, the land is slowly 

healing from its hurts, 
As furrow by furrow, the peasants bring their plows past 

the shell holes of two summers ago. 

Thousands of well worn trails to truth that no shell fire 

can obliterate, 
They are waiting for the day when the whole frontier shall 

be full of the glad calling of bugles and the rapid 

rolling of drums, 
And every road from the East shall be an avenue of 

triumph to the troops returning 

Out of the darkness of hate to the sunshine that smiles 

over France. 

July 20, 19 16. 

DEPORTATION 

Berthe is nineteen and a half: 

A slim dark slip of a girl such as children love and men 

marry and women smile on, anywhere from Toronto 

to Tangiers, 
And she clings to the little window of the third class car 

that rattles and bumps towards the old Belgian 

frontier, and looks back toward France with tears 

in her eyes. 
For she is going into slavery in exile and into worse than 

slavery. 



DEPORTATION 73 

Seventeen years she lived in a village near Lille that still 
resembles Domremy with a house here and there 
shattered by shells. 

And the war came, and whirled her and her mother round 
and round in its eddies and left them stranded 
in a room above a cafe in the rue Ferou in Lille at 
last. 

And Berthe served still and elderly French civilians, and 
Saxon and Bavarian boys who hammered on the mar- 
ble topped tables with their steins; 

And who looked at her like sly and hungry dogs who still 
feel the sting of their master's whip as they walk the 
streets behind him. 

Berthe went among them like a kitten with her hair 

crinkling and ready to spit and leap to a table 

top. 
And she grew older and warier and more intense in her 

hatred for all things German that generally she 

sufficiently concealed. 
And she went to mass and confession less and less, and 

found that she could no longer pray as her mother 

still managed to pray. 
And she found it harder and harder not to do as other 

girls in cafes and houses and hotels were doing, and to 

sell what she had left to sell to the soldiers who stole 

when they could. 



74 WAR FLAMES 

And the German batteries and mill wheels wore away the 

Belgian miners and millwrights they had enslaved 

like their own men and women. 
And German prostitutes were impressed and mobilized 

more and more into farm work and factories for 

clothes and munitions. 
And German psychology faltered and sagged as the second 

winter wore away and German victories were far to 

seek, 
And prisoners marched through the streets of Berlin, and 

prison trains placarded and shunted from station to 

station grew fewer and fewer. 

Then came the days of the wholesale deportations from 

Lille and the rest of the cities in France that they 

occupied. 
And they took the boys of sixteen and seventeen for slaves 

and girls and other women for their pleasure and 

their profit. 
And there were prayers and tears and agonized partings, 

blows and shots and frenzied sellings of the bodies of 

mothers for their daughters, and daughters for their 

mothers and brothers. 
And they herded them into station yards and horse cars 

like cattle, and the trains came day by day and night 

by night, to take them away. 



SPRING IN PICARDY 75 

Berthe is nineteen and a half and she feels nineteen cen- 
turies old and older still tonight. 

And she looks at a girl younger than herself who has sobbed 
herself to sleep and who starts and winces at a sudden 
jar of the train, 

Slipping her hand into the hot hand that clutches and 
clings to it, and looking out through the third class 
window into the twilight and the land of France, 

With the profile and the prophetic insight in her lifted eyes, 

Of the shepherd lass who looked towards Orleans, Rheims 

and Rouen with its market place of madness, while 

she dreamed near Domremy. 

November n, 1916. 



SPRING IN PICARDY 

Off to the east, like thunder that may roll nearer, 
The great guns grumble, shaking black crumbling walls. 
Spider webs fresh spun of sunshine, are swaying gently 

in a jagged gap 
Where a blind soldier sits, brushing away the shadowy 

spiders of pain he feels on his forehead and cheeks 

from time to time. 

A woman waits beside him with her hand in his, 
Feeling him clutch and cling to it, and quiver as the walls 
stir at each jar in the air; 



76 WAR FLAMES 

Seeing shifting pictures of pale horror and red tor- 
ment reeking and reeling still in the blackness he 
stares at; 

Breathing gently, with the invincible patience of a mother 
who has borne her baby in pain and still lives to give 
her body and her blood to him. 

The sun creeps slowly round the great dial of life whose 

half is hidden from men; 
And the guns go on ticking off the seconds and hours of a 

new eternity of pain that persists and seems to rend 

the world. 
And the woman weeps softly and silently, watching her 

brother who is a cripple trying with one hand to clear 

the broken bits of stone away. 
From the grass plot that spreads around her ruined house 

and the mangled flower beds that still mark out its 

borders. 

Facing her is a huge shell hole and a crater, where her 

eyes are caught and lost in blackness again and 

again. 
And from time to time as the guns shake the earth, clods 

crumble and rills of sand and grains of gravel fall 

into it. 
And she stares farther away into emptiness till her eyes 

creep inch by inch to two tiny violets, 



SPRING IN PICARDY 77 

That have blossomed over night at the very verge of the 
void; and she softly looses her husband's hold on her. 

And staggering like a little child she comes, and she falls 
and buries her face and her soul in the France that 
breathes from their fragrance. 

November 12, 1916. 



ENGLAND 



THE ENGLISH FLEET 

Millions of men backed by earth and her mines hold her 

trenches against the great brute. 
Here in these islets of eagles, a bay in the Orkneys has 

focussed the truth and trained brains of the race. 
Milton lives here; Cromwell is cousin to Drake, Shake- 
speare, Pitt, Raleigh, Pym, Sydney, Howe, Hampden 

and Gordon and Nelson. 
Darwin and Maxim, Watts, Stephenson, Faraday, Lister 

and Wallace keep guard on these decks. 
All old audacities driving the Spaniard to death on dim 

sands and far skerries, 
Gleam in the eyes of these boys, of these men that must 

sentinel time for a moment. 
All the old discipline Rome taught their tribes holds them 

firm. 

Earth to this end of today trained her tribes and her 

legions; 
Gathered up riches and raped them from Carthage and 

Egypt, from Babylon, Rome and Golconda. 
Ventured her Vikings at sea from the bergs of the north 

to blue atolls that relay man's trail round the world; 
Flinging forth seamen and ships like their cities, for dice 

in her game with destruction. 
81 



82 WAR FLAMES 

Every still tide and each storm in the seas, since the hour 

that time dawned, wrought to fashion the stuff in 

these ships. 
All the blind life of the ooze that advanced from the slime 

to the sands, to the mountain tops, marched to the 

mind of their masters. 

Lean, gray and grim, these last watch dogs of life lie ready 

and strain their linked leashes. 
Flickering colors astern, spell a vigilance vital as vultures' 

o'er ocean and air. 
Midships comes cracking subdued from the wireless, that 

leaping its sea leagues 
Relays the sea's countersign to its masters from outposts 

of fog and of storm in the night. 

Silent they lie in the sunlight. Destroyers and cruisers, 
Rippled like waves with the shadow and swing of the sea, 

circle round them, 
Colliers lie close to the sides of the swiftest whose turbines 

turn tireless unceasing; 
Hydroplanes home to their hive of new thought and new 

life in the Island to leeward; 
Servants alike to the mind that is making that Service of 

England 
Strength to the wealth of the world of today, and a pledge 

of God's purpose tomorrow. 



THE REEF &3 

Silent they sway down their lines, these scant scores of 

smoke-gray, inscrutable capital ships; 
Oracles dumb of destruction whose silence is stronger 

than bursting of bombs and the surf roar of 

battle; 
Capital letters of law that is written in steel for all earth 

on their desolate bay in the north; 
Spelling the sentence of aggrandized greed and its lying 

and lusting and maiming and murder; 
Capital letters of truth that no facile and phrase making 

fool can gainsay; 
Spelling the will of the world that from ruins and reek of 

all wars marches on, 
On toward the stars, from sea slime to the hills and steel 

sea crests whose service is England's. 

February 12, 1916. 



THE REEF 

There is a reef on the coast near Queenstown. 

There the rocks run down from feathery foliage like talons 

stretched to rake the sea for food. 
On the sand in a pocket of the rocks lies stranded a life 

belt from the Lusitania. 
Bound to it are two children drowned in the night by the 

tide lop. 



84 WAR FLAMES 

The dawn gleams on their cold blue eyes open to daybreak 

and sea gulls. 
The little waves play with them and touch them with 

fingers of children tender and passionate. 
A vine that trails from a rock, waves and beckons them on 

to places that children love to play in. 
Shadows of wings above them flit across the sand and fall 

on their faces. 

They lie like all things human that disintegrate slowly 

in shadow and sunlight. 
And the tides turn and the clouds pass oblivious of 

them. 
But even as they lie there these two dead children are 

stronger 

Than any thousand living men in all the Kaiser's 

armies. 

June 25, 1915. 



THE HOUSE OF LORDS 

Great men and small have sat upon these empty benches. 

Small men, tall hatted, trim, well groomed, have dozed 
their own and England's time away. 

Shades of the past, Wellington, Beaconsfield, Devonshire, 
Salisbury, Aberdeen, Palmerston, Mansfield and 
Roberts have lingered and looked on and listened. 



THE HOUSE OF LORDS 85 

Vice-regents and pro-consuls, Cromer, Curzon, Minto, 

Melbourne, here made history. 
Bishops, lords spiritual, archangels of old lies and greed and 

truth eternal, nodded here and one by one departed. 

A spider works in secret here: dust lies in corners as dust 
lies and molders in the Abbey hard at hand. 

And there is twilight formed by London fogs all winter, 
and through the nights no lights betray its presence 
to stray Zeppelins. 

Here any peer of England used to meet his peers and cro- 
nies, joking, smoking, damning income taxes, praising 
good old days in ducal club rooms once. 

Here there is silence of small voices till a riot rages after 
NorthclifTe tells and sells his tainted truth, 

And Kitchener comes, tall, soldierly, succinct; reports, 
departs and leaves another crater of small critics and 
intenser loyalty. 

Here stronger, sterner, disciplined and tried traditions of 
a past patrician still sufficiently express themselves. 

When Kitchener speaks to England all the hall is full, 
And all the square and streets outside are lined with sol- 
diers and with cheering boys and peering women. 
Kitchener, the Irishman grown older, wiser and more loyal 
far to Empire and England than the wildest youth of 
Ireland; 



86 WAR FLAMES 

No longer the old idol now, efficient and sufficient in each 

infinite detail of war that rocks the world: 
Kitchener, the man and master, feared and trusted still 

by aliens in the East and South; 
Born of the North and West that still can rise to dominate 

earth's destinies; 
Kitchener, the older soul of London and of empire, waking* 

late and blundering far through fog and smoke of 

England's battle, on to light at last. 

The people want a Man to make their newly-wakened 

godhead evident. 
And England stands for loyalty and love to old, tried, 

tottering leaders and dead forms of things today. 
Her powerhouse new of Empire, throbs; here women, 

boys and brooding hearts of hate and grasping hands 

of labor make munitions. 
No one can say today how far her younger lords in uniform, 

and infant heirs of peers' pale widows, may serve 

England's need tomorrow: 
How far her soldiers risen from the ranks and crude 

protagonists of peace may sway and face her future* 

But here today in twilight and in gloom her oldest heirs 
of soldiers and of statesmen loaf and sleep no more. 

They have gone forth to lead her armies and to serve and 
die; and living, dying, hold the seas for freedom. 



MUNITIONS 87 

New ghosts with stigmata of race, and war's red scars and 

ghastly decorations come and take their seats by right, 
They throng long corridors and crowd high galleries where 

older shades in solemn conclave sit; 
Under the shadow of this tallest river tower that like a 

lighthouse of tradition stands 
To lift this light of England's oldest service to her sons 

and heirs, towards truth through night and storm 

imperially. 

February 23, 1916. 

MUNITIONS 

A boy from Eton stands keen eyed in a workshop at 

Woolwich. 
Before him a lathe is turning, smoothly spinning, with 

the regular urge and momentum, and the round orbit 

of planets, 
And his hands and his heart grow hard as they hold the 

turning tool to the point of the shell he is shaping. 

Under the strength of them slivers of steel peel away and 

fall to the floor of the workshop. 
He is forgetting Latin and Greek and the syntax of strange 

conjugations. 
He is forgetting cricket and shedding the crust that 

cramped and congealed him. 



8S WAR FLAMES 

All that is in him now goes to the shaping of shells and the 

truth of their pointing. 
And his face glows with the joy of a young god in the throes 

of creation. 
He is a link in a chain of steel and will that binds the world 

to new and more valiant adventures. 
He is a wave in a tide that spreads through leagues of land 

and sea and air, and far eddies of ether. 

Vital with intolerable vibrance, in the torments of pain 
and the shattering bursting of shells, it advances, 

Shaking and rending gray remnants of years and old tyran- 
nies torturing Europe. 

And the boy with hard hands holding steel that is sharpen- 
ing steel, is its servant. 

Swiftly he turns out his shells and he whistles and sings 

at his working. 
Whether this misses, that fails to explode, or another bursts 

fair on his target, he knows not and cares not 
More than a culture that breeds in its test tube bacteria 

benign or destroying. 

He is a part of a culture of life that breeds its steel cells 
of a planet's renewal like microbes that breed in men's 
bodies. 

And the steel that lay dormant for years is alive in his hands 
as the drops of men's blood it must spill are alive. 



POISONED GAS 89 

As he stands and the lathe turns releasing the slivers of 
steel that fall to the floor from his hands, 

He is man's will that has pointed all steel and the pur- 
pose of life in these shells that dissect man's emer- 
gence. 

August 11, 1915. 



POISONED GAS 

New terror creeps through night and a new breath of death 

has come to kill the sleepers. 
Men wear new masks of horror today to hide the faces war 

defames or signally ennobles. 
New tremblings are betrayed by sleep in dim lit dugouts; 

there are new mutterings of weakness where the 

trenches hold men's backs against the wall. 
And a new hospital behind Bethune that German guns 

have shelled today, tonight is another new inferno 

of unimagined agony. 

Four dim stars in the dark behind blind windows focus 

forty eyes of torment. 
Forty ears of pain hear unheeding gasping and groaning 

of others, and whispering of white faced surgeons 

and nurses. 



90 WAR FLAMES 

Forty lips of animals, blackened and bleeding, utter the 
only lonely voice of revolting and defiance that fright- 
fulness has left to them. 

Forty distorted arms and hands are blackened and swollen 
by gases like the putrifying fragments of life death 
strews today from sea to sea. 

Twenty broken burning bodies of war, blackened and bared 
to the waist are shuddering pulses of a torment man 
has never known before. 

They writhe propped high on grimy pillows, as blackened 
brands are propped on a failing fire of life that lingers 
on. 

Gasping, they are smelling greedily at black balloons of 
oxygen that nurses hand them and replenish con- 
stantly. 

They are new born babes of pain, and the love that dares 
all and devises all that mangled life in man may live 
again. 

And out of the torments of this new birth of horror some 
shall rise and go forth again in the likeness of man 
that is the image of God on earth. 

February 17, 1916. 



THE SEA HAWK 91 

THE SEA HAWK 

Eyes in the seaplane scan the sea for peril, as the sea 

hawk watches the waves for food; 
Eyes of the mind in the air that fitted and fined their lenses 

to find a periscope slitting the sea as a shark's fin cuts 

through blue water. 
The sky above is cloudless and blue and the sea to south- 
ward is still and shadowless. 
To the north a fleck of foam born in the beauty of light 

falls white as a snowflake in air down the blue surface 

of the sea. 
And the seaplane sweeps and circles towards it till its 

shadow hovers over the huger shadow of horror 

half hidden by the sea. 

The men in the submarine are hungry, thirsty, half choked 
by bad air, half dead for lost sleep and close to the 
last limit of sanity and self control. 

They are short of food and drink, short of light oil and 
heavy oil for engines, battery supplies and ammuni- 
tion and extra parts. 

They are short of tenderness, love, pity, common human- 
ity which the German admiralty has carefully shut 
out of their lives with doors that neither water nor 
air can penetrate. 



92 WAR FLAMES 

They are shorthanded, down hearted, black browed, 
sombre souled, bitter with an intense and murderous 
bitterness in their cage of darkness under the sea. 

And the metallic ticking and clicking of the clockwork, 
and the grinding of the engines is translated into tones 
of their voices, every motion they make, every twist 
of their lips, every lift of their eyes. 

And the engines snarl on through shoal water, and the 
captain scans a sea empty of all but one will to kill 
in his own maddened mind. 

He has run afoul of steel nets near Liverpool, and shot 

his divers out to cut their air lines, as they cut the last 

strands of steel wire. 
He has blown the nose off an African liner and seen her 

tilting and dropping people from her as a dog drives 

fleas from him as he dives. 
He has shelled an English hospital ship at long range and 

sunk a trawler in her lee and cursed them both. 
He has seen destroyers and motor patrol boats scuttling 

like water beetles where he submerged, and laughed 

at them. 

And then the storms have taken him and his men and made 
life intolerable and interminable hell for them. 

They have churned them up and down in shallow water 
like maggots in a dead cat a boy swings by the tail 
till he hurls it away. 



THE SEA HAWK 93 

They have run from a cruiser over a series of shoals where 
the bottom plates pounded and their pumps clogged, 
and lain half a day aground in the open, unseen and 
unhoping till night. 

They have struggled as Titans struggle to lighten ship, 
and thrown their spare stores and spare parts away 
willingly. 

And they have gone at last on the last of the tide, leaving 
a spare torpedo and the lives of scores of English men 
and women and children, for children to find dis- 
mantled on English sands. 

The captain and the men brood on this last loss as they 

drive back sullenly to Germany. 
And the tireless ticking and grinding of the engines 

grinds at their nerves and frays them finer and 

finer. 
And the captain stands in his steel turret of terror with 

its mirrors of a magic blacker than any wizard or Ma- 

gian ever worked with or made before. 
And his senses are subdued to tenser torments of hate and 

hunger, and the shadows that flit from side to side 

escape him. 
And the seaplane that has towered high as she swung, 

hovers low and then swoops like a hawk to its 

mark. 



94 WAR FLAMES 

And at last the shadow of death in the air hangs for a heart- 
beat directly over the shadow of death that lurks 
in the sea. 

And the bomb falls as ripe fruit falls in the time and the 
place life made for it 

And a sudden geyser of shining sea water and the life that 
is beauty leaps into the air, 

And the hate of the Germans is gone with their ghosts in a 
giant roar in the mighty wind of their passing. 

But something of their essence still persists and leaks from 
below in a reek of oil that eddies and drifts on the sea. 

February 7, 1916. 

THE POET 

Christ Church tower lifts gray against a sky of April 
that has broken blue. 

Out of an ivy framed window at Oxford that the air- 
vandals have overlooked, a lad is looking. 

He is the youngest son of the oldest don in his college. 

His are the clear features and more subtle stigmata of 
breeding like Byron's and Rupert Brooke's. 

He is home with a broken leg from a football match at 

the training camp. 
Around him are ranks of books where the culture of the 

classics and of England and France is assured to the 

world. 



THE POET 95 

And the lines on the table before him still spell the same 

gracious tradition, 
Lines like the lines of his face that frowns, still inconclusive 

and youthfully unfinished. 

The boy's flesh is soft and clean with a surface culture 

of centuries like the level turf in the quadrangle 

below. 
And the will that works in him is persistent as the clinging 

ivy that frames his face. 
And underneath all there is something as hard and assured 

as the smooth facade of the college and the mind 

that made and perpetrated its pediments. 
He is a part of the plan of England's empire of free peoples 

that nineteen hundred years of history have yet to 

finish. 

For Oxford that is in his blood and in his voice, is a city of 

flowering stone like Florence; 
Mother of scholars and lesser men and empire makers like 

Cecil Rhodes; 
Mother of dreamers and doers in all the earth that the 

will of men, which is the Word of God, may find 
itself; 
Heir of the truest and most perfect traditions of time's 

beauty, that is never perfect, that must break or be 

broken and pass and be ended today. 



96 WAR FLAMES 

And the boy with his broken leg and his boy's face feels 
this as he looks and learns the truth that Oxford 
teaches. 

He knows that no cloistered virtue or beauty or truth is 
sufficient for the world whenever God calls the na- 
tions to war's last assize. 

He knows that Oxford and all England are on trial before 
the world today, as this war is trying and testing him. 

He knows that every son of light in his city and in his 
earth, must witness to the truth as God gives him to 
see it. 

And he sits silent still, as the shadows fall and spread from 

the western wall that hides the sunset. 
And the shadows of his hand and of his pen grow broader 

across the lineless paper that lies before him. 
He is the youth of his class and his caste and of Oxford and 

England that waits still to testify; 
Whether it writes in fire and steel, in the flesh of alien men 

and its own where the trenches are time's last lines of 

truth; 
Whether it builds for its own and all earth a house of life 

and a lantern of light for centuries like Oxford; 
Whether it sets forth imperishably on pieces of paper, the 

soul of England that thrills today through its hour of 

trial and travail and triumph. 

February 22, 1916. 



THE ASSAULT 97 

THE ASSAULT 

A pinnacle of ruin sagging east points like a maimed finger 

from its hill top towards Bapaume. 
An English lieutenant of artillery is the tip of the tentacle 

of wire and steel behind it. 
He smokes his last cigarette, gripping a telephone receiver 

that he holds unconsciously and tenaciously, 
While the trenches before him crumble away steadily as 

the line of ash creeps down the tube of paper toward 

his lips. 

He has seen the English aeroplanes shoot down the Fok- 

kers and Taubes and drive them down. 
He has seen the sausage shaped observation balloons 

sliced through with bombs and obliterated. 
He has seen a battle-plane shelling a battalion caught in 

the open and scattering them. 
He has seen an army's eyes in the air blinded, remembering 

the bloody days near Mons two years before. 

He has heard the guns thunder on for six days and nights 
and another day, 

Catching snatches of sleep as men staggering down from 
the bridge, can learn to sleep through a storm that 
wrecks a week of winter on the Atlantic. 



98 WAR FLAMES 

He has seen the earth leap up in waves and fall back again 
under spatters of rain that seem but the spray of a 
second. 

He has seen each dawn surge up from under the shadow of 
earth like a wilder wave of ruin reddening eastward. 

He has seen the wind shift the smoke down the barrage of 

fire and steel he has built along the arc of his sector. 
And the mighty orchestration of five hundred guns great 

and small, broadly ranged and exquisitely controlled, 

has obsessed him like a dream. 
He feels that he is a mere spectator behind the scenes of a 

drama of death going on before him, 
As alien in spirit to the brain that conducts that orchestra, 

as to the actors on the stage where footlights are the 

flaming mouths of guns. 

He understands indifferently that intolerable intensities 
of hunger and thirst, of sleepless panic and agony 
and mangled hate are fit for it. 

He is too tired to feel it or to forecast the results of the 
morning's assault. 

He sees a sunset's opal islands of air as indifferently as the 
food with his relief that he has waited five hours for. 

And he flings himself down in the warm July night and 
smiles at a breeze from the west and a breath of his 
England that brushes his brows as he sleeps. 



THE ASSAULT 99 

He wakes in a sudden hush of the guns convulsive and 

choked before the dawn. 
He sees a blaze of glory in the sky waiting to welcome the 

English to death or victory. 
He sees a horizon of hideousness becoming clearer with 

every turn of his glasses through every rod of its torn 

and tormented profile. 
He sees the shadows stealing west and thousands of 

shadowy shapes from his own lines advancing to meet 

them. 

He hears the first machine guns come to life, and then the 

barrage of shells has built itself again. 
He sees a river of lava spreading below him, flaming at 

its edges and flanks, sucking into second line dugouts 

in vortices of death. 
He sees men falling fast where machine guns strike like 

rattlesnakes of steel coming swarming from their 

holes. 
He sees men hurling bombs at them as boys cast stones 

at snakes, and crushing them. 

He sees the high tide of the advance rising in waves from 

ridge to higher ridge, 
Curling over and around ruined villages where each house 

is a shattered mask to a huge and grisly mouth of 

hate in the ground. 



ioo WAR FLAMES 

Swallowing English lives by scores till their engineers 

bring dynamite and make an end of it. 
He sees a forest set on fire by shells flaming into a crimson 

parterre of triumph to the south of him. 

And now a red rocket of victory flowers from a village 
hidden in smoke and twilight, and now another. 

Some of the wounded stagger back, and men bring in the 
dying like red and paling petals for a rose jar of mem- 
ories eternal: 

And the boy's thoughts go back to England, to West- 
minster, to the Abbey; till a bell rings and he becomes 
a part of his telephone again. 

For another six square miles have been blasted out of an 
empire of blindness and hate today. 

And again the gunners are at work, getting the ranges, 

lengthening the fuses swiftly for their last grim 

blasting to triumph. 

July 19, 1916. 

THE MACHINE 

A British commissariat clerk looked out of a shattered 

window at Amentieres, 
Weary of the endless monotony of counting and checking 

and issuing rations, 
Thousands of boxes of Peek and Frean's assorted biscuits 

for officers' tea, 



THE MACHINE 101 

Millions of bars of Fry's and Cadbury's and Nestle's milk 

and hazlenut chocolate, 
Myriads of glasses of Cross and Blackwell's red raspberry 

jam, and Andrew Kieler's Dundee orange marmalade 

in its little white porcelain jars, 
Turned to suppurating wounds and blood that caked as it 

oozed in the sepsis of trench fever and intermittent 

typhoid. 

He grew utterly weary of the immense agony and futility 
of the seamy side of the war as it was shown to him, 

Sick of the unending procession of hospital trains and ships 
from England to the front, 

And the interminable scavenging in motor cars of broken 
bodies from third line trenches and huge shell 
holes in little French towns ten miles behind the 
lines, 

Sick of the insufferable organization and standardization 
of suffering, 

In huge base hospitals and clearing houses of horror 
like the one behind him where the longest trains 
went, 

Where deadly wounds were as much a matter of routine 
as his own red jars of raspberry jam were, 

And amputations were as simple and essential as the tear- 
ing of a printed form out of his own red backed order 
book. 



io2 WAR FLAMES 

He grew utterly weary of the thought of the ammunition 

trains rolling back and forth as regularly as a machine 

gun shifts its spray of death; 
And the munition factories working day and night in 

double and triple shifts; 
And the soft hands of women grown hard like their lips 

and their hearts from handling lead bullets and 

copper shell cases. 
And he gazed out of his glassless window at a gray street 

and the roofless rafters of a house ten yards away. 
And he wondered what was the use and the reason and the 

sufficient cause for anyone in the world going on living 

and seeing and hearing it all an hour or a second longer. 

He got up from his seat on an empty packing case and 

leaned away out of the window again, 
And he saw a string of British troopers riding their tall 

gray horses back from the river where they went to 

water them. 
And every one of the ten men had a French child laughing 

and crying aloud astride of the gray back in front of 

him. 
And his thoughts went back suddenly twenty years to the 

time when he first rode his father's horse to the black- 
smith's to be shod in Rottingdean. 
And his thoughts went forward suddenly twenty years and 

more to a time to come, 



A SENTRY 103 

That all the agony and the monotony and the huge and 
wholesale blundering of the war was working and 
waiting for. 

And he went back to his store room again as the last tall 
trooper turned the corner. 

And he went on handling his boxes and his bales and his 
invoices and his checking lists, 

As Joffre and Cordona are handling batteries and bat- 
talions and corps oVarmee and conquering armies. 

September 26, 1916. 

A SENTRY 

He has fallen asleep on the march for the last five days 

and nights since Mons was abandoned. 
He has eaten emergency rations and raw turnips, and 

drunk his sterilized water by thimblefuls. 
He has dug the trenches that gridiron his retreat like a 

man of a football team setting his heels at the last five 

yard line. 
He has seen his comrades falling and shattered, and felt 

the slash of steel in his own flesh. 

He lies in his shell hole and looks towards the East where 
the night and the earth lie like lovers. 

Whispering passion profound and slow peace beyond 
human imagining. 



104 WAR FLAMES 

Overhead in the haze stars drift through space like the 

dust of God's dreams of creation, 
Carving His planets with fire into nerves and the intricate 

knowledge of men. 

He thinks of his chemistry test tubes at home and his 

star showers of flaming magnesium, 
As the German flares suddenly rise and the shells star the 

trenches a half mile behind him. 
Out of the night a dull gray wave suddenly surges against 

him, 
Washing one more atom of mind and of will into the flame 

and the fumes of this acid solution of war. 

June 8, 1915. 



THE STRETCHER BEARER 

He has put two morphia tablets under the tongue 

Of two hundred pounds of red haired torment from Aber- 
deen with half of his hip shot away. 

He has watched a freckled face grinning white in its frenzy 
of sweat and grime, sag and soften like a tired child's 
at last; 

And a huge hand that convulsively clinched and clung 
to life, insensibly relaxed. 



THE STRETCHER BEARER 105 

He has handed the Highlander over to two other stagger- 
ing stretcher bearers. 

He has gone out in front in a gap and a ten-foot shell- 
crater swept by German machine guns intermittently. 

And there he has met another huge hulk of a man crawling 
through a night of shell fire and star shells red and 
green and blinding white, 

Shambling like a bear and growling like a bear at the bite 
of a bullet lightly lodged in his back. 

He has dressed the wound, searing it with iodine, and get- 
ting a back handed swipe in the face from the man's 
scarred hand for his pains. 

He has led the way through the night down a traverse and 
a supply trench toward the first field dressing station 
for yesterday's advance, 

With the wounded man shambling like a bear and swear- 
ing and breathing his own last half inch of rum, hot 
on his heels; 

With shells chiming in salvos in beats of four, and churning 
parapet, parados, dugout and sapheads together, 
before them and behind them. 

He has come into a field that is a short cut through death 
for a dozen different fighting units, 

Pitted with shell pits and splotched with bleeding and rot- 
ting bodies of men and horses and mules, 



106 WAR FLAMES 

With a path and a sputtering trough of mud where dying 
men drown, worn deep by the feet of the dead who 
went before them. 

And they have wound past shell pits, mired to the shoul- 
ders and hips, and rested panting on heaps of bodies 
that stirred obscurely below them in the perpetual 
pelting of rain that froze to sleet as it fell. 

They have oozed with the rest into a road and a river of 
mud where the food and the munitions convoys get 
through three times in five, 

Into an artery of murder strafed persistently all night by 
shell fire, machine guns and snipers with rifles sighted 
and clamped to fixed rests the morning before; 

Where each pulsing of the blood means the stilling of the 
blood in some man's heart, or the maiming of some 
man or beast in mortal and intolerable agony; 

WTiere the pelting of steel is as impartial and persistent 
as the pelt of the sleet, and as pitiless. 

And they have suddenly come out of the storm round the 
shoulder of a hill, where the crying of the wounded 
like the yapping of the puppies of a whipped pack, 
is faint and far away; 

Where masked lights lead the way to a place where it 
begins again spasmodically and indescribably under 
the knives and fingers of the surgeons. 



TANKS 107 

And he has seen his wounded man's face suddenly lit with 
the light of a man who creeps beyond the brute to 
rest and the end of his torment at last, 

And he turns to go back with this hope in his heart 
to the penance of pain his God has imposed in 
Himself; 

And on souls that He strips; that He hammers and rends; 
and finds fit in His trenches to face Him today. 

November 6, 1916. 



TANKS 

Man that makes new chaos out of fire and rending steel, 

and masters and emerges from it, 
Seeking strength to end his wrestling blind where the 

trenches heave like dykes and pressure-ridges of his 

hate volcanic, 
Finds new forms of life that live and freely move across 

this powder pitted wilderness of torment. 

All the earth awoke and smiled and laughed aloud that 

summer morning, echoing the shouting 
When the tanks came waddling past the British lines and 

walking past the hail of steel and wallowing past 

shell pits, 
Like primeval vast sea saurians crawling, creeping still 

inexorably onwards. 



108 WAR FLAMES 

All the brains and will of England's empire and her 

sailors of far continents and islands, stayed to steer 

them. 
All the might of new munition cities turning out steel 

shells and engines, chains and wheels and rails was 

writhing rolling through them. 
All the strength of all the motherhood of England lived 

to bear these iron babes of war and lift them past each 

crater torn by travail. 

So they traced the curves of life that rising, falling, sway- 
ing, surging, moves by wave lengths; 

Straddling trenches, enfilading bastions, till the Boches 
quit, and holding up a hundred quivering hands 
cried "Kamerad;" 

Treading dugouts down, and thrusting under hell's machine 
gun hatches, shouldering away the walls of villages as 
saurians vast picked out their meat from huts they 
cracked like nuts. 

Dukes' and ditchers' sons of England followed breath- 
lessly and shouting, digging in, and sweeping 
up their flotsam as they lumbered on towards 
Lens. 



TANKS 109 

Men by millions following their trail in print, saw vaster 
vistas opening, rising from raw ruts in time where 
life from shapes of slime to larger life emerges. 

Men begotten of brine and sea-ooze that undulates and 
swirls, on earth and women, laboring up to motor 
coiling round all roads and rivers, spiraling through 
air, beheld and loved their slow and stolid lumbering 
solidity. 

So they came, the iron land ships, from their island past 
the channel, past the trenches, toward Berlin. 

Manned by men whose fathers souls of Vikings steering 
sea snakes, wild war dragons, out past Avalon, past 
Iceland, fared still farther forth to sea; 

Men who mastering all storms of centuries by land and sea, 
still steering past this storm of fire and steel, sail on 
to destinies unknown indomitably. 

January 16, 1917. 



RUSSIA 



THE DAWN 

Before the sun the light begins to grow and smile on 

Mother Russia. 
It sifts through shifting meshes of shadow and drifting 

mists that cease as shadows cease. 
The birds begin to stir and sing like little living echoes of 

sunrise, 
Their notes fall clear as dewdrops on a field that war has 

trampled. 

One of our men was looking through a steel loophole in a 

trench fifty yards from the enemy's salient. 
And he saw a man's face raised above the parapet turned 

to the sunrise as a nun regards an ikon. 
And he centered his sights on the lips that closed and that 

parted in silent adoration. 
Then suddenly shifted his aim to the bronze number at 

the corner of the uniform collar and fired. 

We were without the shells that are war's hypodermic 

needles of hate. 
And we lay in our lines cursing like morphine fiends when 

their daily dose of drug is denied them, 
"3 



H4 WAR FLAMES 

While in the south the Prussians and Austrians fused and 

blasted their way of blood toward Lemberg. 
Then one day carloads of ammunition came through 

from a factory in Osaka, 
And our guns shook the day, and scarred the night with a 

bombarbment of meteors that burst when they 

struck. 

Dawn shuddered into clearer horror as we ran hurling 

hand grenades. 
Down two kilometers of trenches we drove them to the 

marsh's edge. 
At last, as croupiers at Monte Carlo rake up their stakes, 

our men raked up the dead. 
Some were distorted and shattered. We came on one boy 

by himself, 
Smiling and perfect, as the head of Hermes in the Winter 

Palace at Petrograd, 
Lying with blind eyes looking to the East. And one of our 

sharpshooters nodded and said, 
"This is the one that I shot as he looked at the sunrise 

yesterday. 
He is beautiful as a statue and glad as a girl in the arms of 

her lover. 
And the soil of Russia will be richer for him forever and 

ever." 

July ii, 1915. 



THE ARK 



THE ARK 



ii5 



Two old men bearing a stretcher splash through the gut- 
ters of a ghetto in Kovno, 

And the raindrops print their patterns on the oily swirl 
that eddies through the gutters as they go. 

There is a faint red line that renews itself from time 
to time as the leader's cheek leans to his greasy 
shoulder; 

And there are slow red drops falling from sodden canvas, 
painting faint crimson lines where the rabbi's feet 
make patterns. 

These men are old with the age of a race haunted by sor- 
row when Berlin was a kitchen midden, and the 
Hohenzollerns the naked slaves of slaves. 

They have known robbery, captivity, slavery, murder and 
outrage in Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt and all the ghet- 
tos of Europe. 

They have wandered in the wilderness and paid blood 
sacrifice to gods of wood and stone stained brown 
with blood. 



n6 WAR FLAMES 

They have sold their sons and daughters to Baal and 

Astaroth, Astarte and Moloch, and taken their share 

of the world's wealth for them. 
And ever they have circumcised their sons, sanctified their 

food, lit their altar lights and honored for ages the 

lightest letter of their law. 

They have betrayed and traded and crucified their Messiah 
and raised him from the dead, that a remnant of men 
might see the God in man that dies not. 

They have sold and delivered their sons and daughters to 
devils and gods of gold and silver, copper and brass 
and steel and dynamite today. 

They have haggled with the craftiest and the richest of 
the money changers that Christ today casts out of 
the temple of God defamed in man. 

They have seen their children slain by Herod and his 
soldiers, and old Herods dying slowly, and always new 
murderers born in the image of God again. 

And always a remnant of them have kept the vision of 
Messiah and a man child born of woman to save the 
world, safe in the hearts of men. 

For this they have toiled and traded and hoarded and 
cheated and lied and died, and lived to die again. 

For this they have prospered and plotted like Moses, and 
laid plagues on their foes from generation to genera- 
tion of Pharoahs and Herods who hate God. 



THE ARK 117 

For this they have marched like Moses through the desert, 
mounted to talk with God in the mountains, and cast 
down and broken and blasphemed the tables of the 
law. 

For this like all men to whom God is a Holy Ghost, they 
have seen their Holy Land afar, and have not entered 
in. 

Two Hebrew brethren, old and broken, bearing the names 
of their leaders of old, go tramping through the gutters 
of a Kovno ghetto. 

They tramp through Russia with its illimitable freedom 
of tundra and steppes, and its starving millions that 
have crawled and crushed them into the persecutions 
and perjuries of the Pale. 

They tramp through water that swirls away to ripple 
through sandy reaches of sunlight where the blood 
and filth of man that it washes away in part depart 
from it. 

They bear with them the body of a man child fresh cir- 
cumcised to meet Messiah, that a shell splinter has 
made a broken promise of faith in flesh and blood. 

They bear unknowing the Ark of a new covenant that 
God makes with His chosen in blood and tears today. 

And the angels of a wind of infinite mercy and compassion 
waft through mist that clears, to wipe all tortured 
faces. 



n8 WAR FLAMES 

And the sunlight that is the smile of a God that suffers 
in the flesh with men, glitters on their tears that fall 
as His last raindrops fall; 

Till the spirit of God has fulfilled itself today in sacrifices 

by fire and blood He shares with His chosen people 

of promise and infinite pain. 

February 28, 19 16. 

PINSK 

The August sun climbs slowly and his light streams down 

on illimitable marshes in Russia. 
And the strength of his rays is blunted and blinded, lost 

and lavished vainly on a world of stagnant matter. 
And no eye and no lens on earth can analyze or synthesize 

the secrets that lie hidden in its depths. 
There is no cloud in the sky that grows gray, and no ripple 

in the water and no sound and no stir in the air. 

Suddenly bullets begin to fly like dragonflies of steel, 

flitting and hurtling between the grasses. 
And the sound of their escape from the cells of brass that 

held them telegraphs a will that finds its word at last. 
In the pauses of their firing comes the fervid pulsing of 

racing motor boats that move among the marshes. 
And the stillness wakes, and raggedly it breaks from 

north to south into the harsh, heart-shaking surf and 

symphony of battle. 



PINSK 119 

There is a railroad through the marshes that the Russians 

have dynamited and destroyed. 
And the German engineers come swarming as ants swarm 

around small carrion to drag their siege guns over 

it. 
They have relaid a length of track and run a loaded train 

on it to test it. 
Ahead, half a kilometer, there is a huge hummock, in the 

midst of the marshes 
And the train strains, the wheels grate, the rails sag and 

spread as it climbs slowly from the swamp toward an 

insufficient safety. 

Days pass and weeks, and darkness once more weighs 

down the daylight. 
And the wolves have returned to the land once more, and 

their howling is heard through the howling of the 

wind. 
They come like a cold gray wave of life from the North. 

They are as gray as the Germans, as grim and as 

greedy. 
And over fresh formed ice they harry hungry Germans 

still filling their bottomless pits in the swamp. 
And the wolves are the living voices and the avid 

mouths of the winter hunger of the whole war- wasted 

land. 



120 WAR FLAMES 

The Germans go on filling and packing these running 

wounds in the flesh of the earth that their armies 

have deepened and widened. 
They throw down mattresses of green fir tree boughs, and 

cast down carloads of gravel and earth ballast above 

them. 
And the carloads sink and disappear as men sink and 

disappear in an assault till the track has crawled 

another rail length eastward. 
Foot by foot, rail length by rail length, they fight their 

way eastward on toward Moscow, on toward Petro- 

grad. 

The days pass and white flakes float down like the frozen 

breath of famine that watches them. 
A train of siege guns stands at the last hummock while the 

track is tested and secured before it. 
Slowly they move forward at last, and as they move the 

sky is obscured and the blizzard has besieged them. 
And the black engines are no more the work of man, but 

shrouded monuments of his madness measuring itself 

against the universe. 

Every snowflake that falls is one more weight on the 
burdened floating bridge that breaks across the sur- 
face of the marsh. 

Bullets from marauding Cossacks scar the guns and mor- 
tars slashing black scars in the white snow coating. 



TEN MILLION REFUGEES 121 

Snipers appear from hiding shouting. They hold their 
breath that freezes suddenly. 

Like a single fallen traveller sinking shapeless in the bliz- 
zard, the train is sinking. 

All the strength of Essen's engines that have thundered 
through from Przemysl on to Kovno reels and writhes 
as a wounded soldier writhes in torment. 

The white flakes fall and the wind ceases as the last gun 
shots cease. 

All the works of men and their wickedness are white in the 
utter silence in the illimitable sanctities of a God's 
forgiveness. 

August 31, 1915. 

TEN MILLION REFUGEES 

This is no sudden vivisection like Belgium's swift rape and 

martyrdom. 
For months they have waited and foreboded; watching 

the skies flame redder and nearer at night. 
Hearing the thunder of the guns roar louder as breakers on 

a beach in a rising storm roar louder surging nearer. 
And ever leaner and browner regiments from the Urals 

and the tundra, came trampling like swimmers 

through shallows into the rising surf of battle. 
And ever trains and groans and dripping wagon loads of 

wounded came rolling back like streaming stones that 

roll and screech across the beach in the back lash. 



122 WAR FLAMES 

So they went on planting, hoeing, reaping their crops, 
praying to their ikons, and saying, "But they never 
can come here." 

And at last a score of wire drawn Cossacks on jaded 
horses came stringing into a street that sobbed at 
twilight, and drove away the Czar's share of their 
cattle. 

And four tall Siberians on foot went East, West, South, 
North; plastering their houses with the little Father's 
last proclamation, and the last touch of human 
hands those walls were ever to feel. 

And there was a fire in the night and another, and another, 
till one tall wall of flame rose in another tongue of 
this Pentecost of all the races of Russia, talking to 
the night that made them. 

There was a castle on the hill and its turrets burned as 
their rick stacks burned. 

And its false gods burned as their ikons burned, Neitzsche, 
Treitschke, Bernhardi, Schnitzler, burned with scrofu- 
lous prints from Paris and memoirs of seventeenth 
and eighteenth century royal and ennobled prostitu- 
tion. 

And out of the reek and smoke of the burning library 
came the false liberals, intellectuals, ego-nihilists, 
governesses, tutors, futurist poets, cubist painters, 
students and cadgers on the bounty of the count. 



TEN MILLION REFUGEES 123 

But the count and his sons were with the army and the 
countess and her daughters with the imperial nurses 
at Petrograd. 

And because these weaklings had nothing of themselves 
in them, they were lost and dispersed and perished 
utterly, with sick madmen and consumptive children 
in this purging of all Russia by fire and steel. 

And there were others that lost themselves utterly or 
transiently in this driving tide of a thousand eddies 
from a thousand burning villages, cities and towns. 

Lawyers, inspectors, police, petty nobles, small proprietors, 
merchants, manufacturers, teachers, doctors, shop- 
keepers, with their wives and kept women, their 
children and nurses, their servants and parasites. 

All dispossessed like the peasants, and driven on and on 
night and day, by hunger and thirst and the fear of 
the fire of all Russia burning to ashes behind them. 

But the ashes of Russia were alive; and like a tide that 
slowly tops a dyke and streams away in the plain 
beyond, they went on streaming from the West along 
the lines and roads and ruts and ridges of least re- 
sistance. 

Crowding closer as the road narrowed, spreading as it 
opened out, turning as it turned, thrust blindly to 
either side where it forked by the pressure that came 
closest and most insistentlv on it. 



124 WAR FLAMES 

For man was reduced here to his lowest factors of cold 
and hunger and fatigue; and the human brute's ability 
to go on under varying pressures and privations of 
fatigue and cold and hunger. 

And the man who struck across the fields to find food for 
his wife and child and failed, as he lost them sud- 
denly or saw them dying slowly hour by hour, be- 
came a dumb and driven and a senseless and soulless 
beast: 

Bearing man's heaviest burden at the last — himself; striv- 
ing in every staggering limb, sore sinew, inch of strain- 
ing lungs and griping entrails, to still stagger on. 

Obsessed by the blind hypnotic drive and rhythmic drag 
of the road and the hordes of feet that trampled it, 
thrust on farther and farther to meet the ever heavier 
blind drag downward of the earth; 

Till with the last emptiness of mind and heart; queasy 
belly, blurring brain, numbing nerve, with nothing 
left to hold up, he fell and died there. 

And the women who were weaker and yet stronger in 
their sufferings for others, struggled on and died with 
them. 

And the ending of the weakest always was the easiest. 

Some who were beautiful gave themselves freely to Cos- 
sacks who rode by the road, sitting behind them on 
their horses, hugging them. 



TEN MILLION REFUGEES 125 

Some who were Spartan fought and kept watch all night 

for their children and themselves, like cattle ringed 

by lean gray wolves at calving time. 
Some who were nuns and prostitutes at heart, reverted 

instantly to type, and sold themselves for honey, 

tripe, turnips, sausages, to any man that cared to 

have them. 
Some who were prostitutes gave their last mouthfuls, their 

last strength for days, to help a greater weakness 

than their own. 
And some young mothers strained the frozen tears in 

their eyes, and the frozen blood in their veins into 

milk in their drying breasts to give their dying babies 

food. 
And some who had brought their older children safe so far, 

went raving mad seeing a woman with a newborn 

babe lying naked and frozen in frozen blood by the 

roadside. 

So they went on suffering and dying, scattering and con- 
gesting, as town on town and village on village was 
fired behind them. 

And whatever human or inhuman appetite or passion was 
strongest in the ego or the mob, rose to the sur- 
face and fought and prevailed and persisted to its 
limit. 



126 WAR FLAMES 

Gamblers squatted by the wayside. Thieves looted the 

living and the dead, and the mob tortured and lynched 

whomsoever it pleased. 
Starving peasants here gave their feeblest food, lest food 

be denied them in turn; rich farmers there met their 

fringes with curses, stones, dogs and bird shot. 
And ever the Jews crept past the rest in mobs of their own 

at night, reviled and cursed by all, and persisting past 

the rest in misery that had learned to suffer longer. 
And ever the babies and the youngest mothers and the 

youngest children died, and the oldest men and women 

died with them. 
And as the cold of the winter came closer and sifted and 

slew them more and more; 
As the men and boys, all but the oldest and the weakest 

were taken for the army to dig trenches and toil on 

roads and railroads; 
There remained at last, when snow hid the rotting bones 

of Russia for a space, only the strongest of the older 

folk and multitudes of younger women. 

Of these they say a million came to Moscow, and a million 

more to Petrograd. 
And their faces were blank masks of misery and apathy, 

with every human need and prayer and passion ironed 

out of them. 



TEN MILLION REFUGEES 127 

Only brute appetites for food and drink, warmth, shelter, 

rest and sleep persisted there. 
And these they found doled out grudgingly in vacant 

barracks and exhibition halls and new barracks of 

planks in parks of Petrograd and Moscow and each 

smaller city that received and hated them. 
For the war bore hard on the cities of Russia that 

were too full of women and children and old men 

before. 
And these that were fit for work on the farms alone, could 

produce nothing, and they went on still consuming 

much. 

As the hordes driven from the fields creep and seep into 
the cities, other hoards shaken by the war from the 
shadows begin to move: 

Hoards of copper, hoards of silver, hoards of gold, of 
jewels, of sacred vessels, of old brocade and lace, of 
love and pity, piety and tenderness, and faith that 
gives and smiles with empty fingers. 

Hoards of happiness conserved to strengthen grief, hoards 
of love to stand and serve where no hope is, 

Hoards of science and her servants that are baffled like 
the bravest and the tenderest, before the magni- 
tude of tasks that men and women must begin 
tomorrow. 



128 WAR FLAMES 

For after all the other ravages of war are restored, these 
millions of refugee women remain a menace and an 
incubus in the cities where there were too many 
women before. 

For the farms rebuilding slowly cannot take and feed them 
all nor half of them, and more and more still come; 
and Siberia has turned them back already. 

And day and night there breed in them the same brute 

appetites for food and drink and warmth that breeds 

fecundity, 
And for the men that must come back from war at last 

to find them lurking in the shadows of all Russian 

cities; 
To breed in them disease and pestilence that always lurk 

where men and women may not breed their children 

working in the open air. 
And two Kaisers and their captains kill ten million men in 

war that wastes the world today. 
And out of these five million wasted women they shall 

breed ten million and a hundred million tainted lives 

to leech the world tomorrow. 

March 13, 19 16. 



THE SPY 129 

THE SPY 

They found him as they advanced after the German raid 

on Memel. 
A moujik old and stooping, stumping and stumbling on 

clumsy crutches. 
One leg was rigid, its ankle always at an awkward angle 

to the scrawny thigh above it. 
He lived in a hut near the high road, half a verst from a 

village that still was smoking. 

One day the Cossacks caught him and set a red hot iron 

to his twisted ankle. 
And he held it rigid while he yelled and cursed them in 

quavering Russian. 
And they sounded the cracks and corners of his cabin with 

their lances. 
And they dug in the hardened earth of the floor before his 

hearth and found there nothing. 

There was a well-head near his hut and he sat in the sun 

propped up beside it, 
And he listened to the talk of the orderlies and officers who 

came there for water. 
Often they made him drink before them to prove that the 

water was not poisoned overnight, 
And he used to sit there till late at night smoking his pipe 

through the April twilight. 



i 3 o WAR FLAMES 

One night in June a young lieutenant lay in the tall grass 
near the well with his colonel's daughter, 

Boylike, slim, in uniform, willing to fight and die with her 
father and with her lover. 

And they lay long in silence watching the stars and dream- 
ing and wondering as lovers will. 

And at last in the silence towards midnight they heard 
someone near them talking a language strange to 
them. 

They stole in the night around the well-head, one to each 

side, silently, as a cat steals. 
And they found him on his knees talking to his God 

through a telephone receiver. 
And the big boy caught him and held him fast. And the 

girl found the displaced stone, and she cut the wire 

and replaced the stone. 
Then they took him away through the night to her father's 

headquarters. 
And he walked as a young man walks, but his hair beneath 

the wig was white when they shot him next morning. 

June 21, 1915. 



THE DANCE 131 

THE DANCE 

Over the dusty Galician hills near Jaraslaw a column 

winds like a wounded snake. 
A thousand Russian prisoners fringed by guards from 

Fiume plod and hang their heads. 
The September sun beats hot on them. They come like 

cattle sweating and reeking and tainting the wind. 
They march with the long enduring strength and dumb 

apathy of driven beasts long driven. 

Noon arrives and they halt; and soup from two rusty camp 

kitchens on wheels is distributed. 
The men squat on the dusty grass by the road munching 

black bread and longing dumbly for vodka and kvass. 
An Austrian officer strides up and down smoking a long 

cigar deliberately. 
The Russians look at him and they envy him his cigar 

far more than his freedom. 

A young Cossack leaps to his feet whistling as boys whistle 

when school lets out. 
His comrade pulls out a little pocket flute and sets his 

mouth and his fingers to the holes in the wood. 
The young Cossack stamps his feet and flings his cap away. 
He begins to dance in wide circles round the other who 

pivots slowly as he plays.i 



132 



WAR FLAMES 



He leaps into the air and whirls twice before touching 

the ground. 
He seems to dance sitting, falling backward, crossing and 

uncrossing his feet and forever losing and keeping 

them. 

He grins, he snaps his ringers, a lock of hair flaps about 
his forehead as he shakes his head. 

He flings his arms wide and folds them, hugging his happi- 
ness to his heart. 

His eyes shine and no longer is he dancing alone in the 
dust of Galician foot hills. 

He is at home on the steppes, and the Cossack girls are 
laughing and singing and keeping step with him. 

All the long youth of Russia wakes as he whirls, and dances 
with him as his shadow dances. 

All the wide rapture of Russia in sunlight swirls as the 
dust swirls, as the wind whirls: 

Invincibly. 

June is, 1915. 



ITALY 



THE RED CROSS CHAUFFEUR 

He was an Italian intellectual before the war. 

And his mind was a paper mosaic of surface facts in 
print. 

And his soul saw life in a series of prismatic posters, subtly- 
degenerate or sharply distinguished, as defectives di- 
verge from the human norm. 

He was an art critic who called the Cubists art's clumsy 
children; whose fancy was infatuated six weeks with 
the Futurists' fad for force infuriate vanquishing 
vacuums. 

And the women that he knew wearied him as well as the 
men. 

They seemed to him only small restless lives and feverish 

fingers of waste, 
Fit only to fling to the winds the money the men made and 

stole and hoarded for them; 
And to utter and reutter lies and the small change of 

life; as small, as soiled, as commonplace and machine 

made as the small five lira notes they scattered in 

shops. 
And their audacities were as trivial as the paint life daubs 

on its dolls, 

i3S 



136 WAR FLAMES 

As transient as chalky white powder rubbed off of 
life's blackboards, where he saw their small faces 
grow black with the night that leaked through 
them. 

And their adulteries were as thinly spectacular as the 
clothes that advertised them; and their whitest bodies 
turned black to him with the putrefaction of their 
souls that spilled and spread in them. 

One thing saved him from them, and the legal, political, 

social, financial, judicial, critical rottenness of Rome; 

and that was speed alone. 
He had a motor car that he worshipped as he worshipped 

nothing else in life but the speed that informed and 

forever outran it. 
He drove to all the great race meets of Europe. He was 

well known in all the drivers' training camps. 
And for distances of less than an hour he could drive with 

the world's record holders. And above that he was 

useless. 
He was a little man with double lensed glasses, with eyes 

that grew useless after more than an hour's strain in 

the glare of the road. 
And after his third wreck in four months he was mending 

a broken leg in a plaster cast near Pisa, when Italy 

entered the war. 



THE RED CROSS CHAUFFEUR 137 

He had known speed and loved her, felt her hands on 
his face, her breath in his nostrils, her whole body 
closer to his than ever woman came or would 
come. 

He had heard her singing to him in the night, calling to 
him to advance the spark, till the car leapt from a 
hilltop straight for the middle of the Milky Way and 
mounted space towards it. 

He had bathed in speed as a strong swimmer bathes in a 
cataract; and always he came back bathed and re- 
freshed by it from the road to the hospital. 

So he went to war with his car, and there the eyes men 
warned him would be a handicap, were no handicap 
at all. 

For the nurse that always went with him was as immune 
to fear, as disdainful of danger as himself; and she 
always drove till the moment came to dodge the shells 
as a cat dodges snowballs hurled by a dozen boys at 
once. 

And for that moment once a day or once a week he lived 
to the limit as he had never lived or hoped to live be- 
fore. 

For the shells raced faster than any car on earth, and 
they were the footfalls of Speed and the flash of her 
eyes that allured him and led him as love leads a 
lover. 



138 WAR FLAMES 

And he moved through the months unmindful of all else; 

but one day when the snow was white in the air he 

was aware of the face of the nurse in the car near 

him. 
It was pale and strained and white against the snow 

flakes, and it was lit by a light of love from within 

whiter than anything else on earth. 
And it seemed to race through the air near him like the 

face of Speed Herself; and he raced that day into a 

place where the Austrians were dropping ten shells a 

minute. 
And the first time he got away with his wounded; and he 

saw her face near his as he started back, but the 

doctor at the dressing station held her by force as the 

car leapt away. 

And the second time a shell burst close to him, half a mile 
from the hospital, and the splinters cut an artery 
in his leg and a feed tube close to his feet. 

And he advanced the spark and the essence trickled slower 
and slower, past the slash in the tube, and he knew 
that life was flowing from him faster and faster 
through the slash in his flesh. 

And the girl's face, which was the face of Speed, came 
closer to him as he clung to his wheel, and as the car 
stopped she had sprung from her hospital porch and 
caught him falling. 



BEPPINO 139 

And some said he was a hero, some a fool, when he died; 

but he was only an Italian intellectual, neurotic and 

semi-degenerate; 
Functioning freely to the limit of the specialized life for 

whose testing all Italy stands with the others at war. 

March 13, 1916. 

BEPPINO 

Twenty centuries of bastard Greece and Rome near 

Naples bred him. 
Hiero, Nero, Tiberius, Sixtus, Caesar Borgia, lived again 

in him, 
Born of the scum of a slum of shadows, fostered of filth 

that was the fevered breath of his nostrils. 
Pander, spy, sly bully of the Camorra, perjurer, robber, 

murderer for hire, and hirer of lesser murderers. 

And the war came and wrecked his affairs like the affairs 
of better men. 

The men and the male needs and appetites of men mobi- 
lized and went north to the firing line. 

And there was no market for women, and no money for the 
sale of women. 

And the Camorra like a gorged snake lay close, and there 
was neither tribute nor protection from it for him. 

And he grew hungry and sick of the listless loves of his 
slaves who had nothing more to offer him. 



140 WAR FLAMES 

Only Lucia was left that he had watched ripening to his 

hand for fifteen years; 
Beautiful as a flower of the slime that time and Naples 

alone achieve together. 
Something of the soul of Greece and Rome still lived and 

smiled in her. 
And she worked in the war charities, and hunger and 

exaltation of the war were making her still more 

beautiful. 

All of her men had gone to the war and she was left alone 

at his mercy. 
And at last he found a foreigner and a painter who wanted 

a new model for his mistress. 
And Beppino showed her to him and the fool bungled the 

business, and Lucia went frantic with terror. 
And she ran madly to the railroad track with Beppino a 

block behind, ready to throw herself under any train 

that was passing. 

There was a hospital train at a siding ready to start for 

the front. 
She slipped into its white sanctuary; Beppino flattened 

himself on the roof of a forward car like a snake in the 

roof of a dove cot. 
And the train rolled on through the night to Rome, and he 

made a nest in the night for himself in a car half filled 

with carboys of acids. 



BEPPINO 141 

And the carboys held as they crashed through the tunnels 

toward Florence; and Milan relayed their last iron 

racer to death in the north. 
And at last they lay on a siding near Trent, seeing trenches 

ten miles away where bursting shells sprayed a surf 

of sound toward the summits. 

The wounded were ready and red for them, and Lucia 

learned lessons of pain and pity the city could never 

teach her. 
They shot two hospital orderlies for spies that day; and 

Beppino was found and forced to dig their graves and 

pitchforked into the place of one of them. 
Life had made him at home in the smell of blood and the 

feel of filth, fit for this service essentially. 
And as the hunger of his filled belly stilled, the hunger of 

his soul for the money Lucia had stolen from him grew 

greater and greater. 
For her beauty grew greater daily, and he watched her in 

secret and grew sick and shaking with the sight of it. 

Then came the day when the Austrians shelled the hos- 
pital train on its way to Milan near a culvert they 
wrecked. 

And the tunnel was blocked behind them, and the cars 
became shambles that dripped, till flame licked up 
the drip like the last of the life that was left. 



142 WAR FLAMES 

And Lucia was left with a few of the wounded on the bare 
mountainside, and the shells searched them out and 
crept nearer and nearer. 

And Beppino went mad as he lay in the wreck of the cul- 
vert, and saw the shells falling and the rocks breaking 
around her. 

And he climbed till he caught her as she fell swooning where 

the last man died by her side. 
And he saw she was unhurt and he held her to his heart 

as he climbed higher and higher toward the snow line. 
And he felt that she was too fair there for war to mangle 

or any man on earth to sell or pollute. 
And he strangled her in her swoon in the snow, and he 

never looked at her face again as her body fell forever 

down a green crack in a glacier. 
Then he climbed back slowly, methodically to his feast of 

cruelty in the hospital; 
And to long waiting till the war was over, and other 

women were to be had for hurting and selling. 

March 29, 1916. 



THE RECESS 143 

THE RECESS 

Giulietta, Elizabetta and Vittoria have escaped for a day 

from the hospital. 
Instead of white bandages reddening, they have seen 

sunrise on snow peaks. 
Instead of groaning and straining breathing, they have 

known the cool stillness of the hills that heals. 
Instead of the smell of blood, of decay, of disinfectants 

that deadened them, 
They have breathed a sky-full of summer, cloudless and 

luminous. 

They have stripped off womanhood that came before their 
time with the grime on their garments. 

They have found a pool like a shining epaulette on a 
shoulder of the hills that march toward Austria. 

They are naked Pagan girls and chattering children again 
there; 

Splashing one another with water that glitters, and thread- 
ing red berries for bracelets and necklaces. 

July 16, 1916. 



144 WAR FLAMES 



THE TRANSPORT 

Women with children clinging to them cluster on a dockend 

at Brindisi, 
Watching the stern of a transport crowded and dumb 

that slowly swings away from the world. 
The last cheering has ceased, and the last casting away of 

cables and ropes that thrilled through them, 
Like the beginning of an amputation that death and the 

years have yet to accomplish. 

Handkerchiefs flutter from their fingers like the fluttering 

of nerves before the opiates and the knife have done 

their work. 
And the sense of an immense and an irreparable loss lies 

heavy on them as the steamer merges with the mist 

at the mouth of the harbor. 
And grimy handkerchiefs grow wet and grimier still, and 

children cry because they are hungry and cold, and 

because they see their mothers' tears and feel their 

trembling. 
But the taller boys tug at the hands that hold them, 

straining and staring toward the pier head and the 

gray sea road that stretches beyond. 



THE TRANSPORT 145 

For the youth of Italy has awakened at last, and her ships 

are ferrying forth across the Adriatic to Avlona and 

the mountains that menace it. 
As the triremes of Scipio and Caesar once set forth, as the 

galleys of Genoa, Venice, Pisa and Palermo ravaged 

and ruled the seas; and carried the war to Africa, to 

Carthage and Bysantium. 
And weaker hearts hark back to the women on the pier, 

but stronger spirits throng to the bow of the Citta 

de Roma; 
Beautiful and dimly seen, a tense embodied dream of steel 

and disciplined ideal of Italy today at her harbor 

mouth; 

Breasting the waves of this sea of mist and submarines, 

like some strong swimmer through a stroke's eternity. 

November 16, 19 16. 



AUSTRIA 



THE MONASTERY 

An Austrian column has camped in a pine wood and set 
its fires ablaze up the hill. 

At the foot of the slope is a monastery of twenty monks; 
this morning immune to the world. 

A new virus of virile and violent life has begun to germi- 
nate in the grayest soul that grew still in the shadows 
here. 

And the youngest monk, looking at the campfires climbing 
the hill, thinks of the candles he lights on his altar at 
Easter. 

Grain and wine have been requisitioned for the army, and 
the monks who are Austrian too, have given them 
willingly. 

They have given their chapel and their refectory for hospi- 
tal wards for the wounded and the sick. 

And some of them stare restlessly from the shadows of 
the porch, impelled to give more in an orgy of giving 
that grips at them. 

Feeling like women in lonely houses who give themselves 
and all they have gladly to lovers war gives them for 
a night. 

149 



150 WAR FLAMES 

A landwehr lieutenant who has played in the concert halls 

of the world, has found the fiddle of the novice who 

lights tall white candles. 
He plays in the chapel for the sick, slow music Palestrina 

made pity eternal for men. 
He walks through the cloisters clasping the key to all 

locks of the spirit and turning it round in men's hearts. 
He comes to the door and the Austrian hymn pealing out 

through the porch starts a singing that spreads 

through the forest. 

And the singing rises and falls and dies in distance and 
darkness at last. 

And he stands in the open under the trees, where the 
stars and the shadows call to him and all his hearers. 

He begins to translate the call of the stars and the whispers 
of shadows into truth no creed and no church or chapel 
walls can contain. 

He plays to them motives from the folk songs of his boy- 
hood and the boyhood of every man whose mother 
sang the song of life itself to him. 

And the novice stands in the shadows of the crumbling 

porch, listening and lost in the music. 
He stands in the porch of a new life opening to him as 

simply and inevitably as sunrise opens all heights and 

all ways through the world. 



THE OPERATION 151 

He knows that no ten or twenty men can prison God and 

man today in houses made with hands in a hole in 

the forest. 
He knows that war is only one red key life turns when all 

others fail in the darkened doors of her prisons. 
He knows tomorrow he must go forth with the multitudes 

who march to find her face forever; and finding, are 

spent in the seeking. 

March 17, 1916. 



THE OPERATION 

He had no illusions about the war and Austria's share in 
the war. 

He refused to go to the front with the other great sur- 
geons, saying, "Some one must stay home to train 
new men needed a year and two years from now." 

And the other big men laughed at him; surgeons and strate- 
gists, merchants and journalists, pointing him out 
at the club and in the street. 

He fought duel after duel till they let him alone, taking 
life swiftly and cleanly with his sword as he saved it 
with his scalpel. 

But he never fought with young men fit for war, only with 
their elders and the titled degenerates that he loathed 
as he loathed a malignant tumor. 



152 WAR FLAMES 

Gradually he was left to himself and the work of his staff 
of boy surgeons and nurses. 

Gradually the men went away, and the sons of his brain 
and old age taught by him to pioneer the world's 
advance in surgery and research were taken from 
him. 

Gradually the wrecks came back and he toiled through 
eternal hackwork of repairing and refitting incompe- 
tent and broken parts. 

He toiled with electrical machines and mastered them, 
and sent new currents of life thrilling through torn 
nerves and severed sinews. 

And constantly he sent his most beautiful and intricate 
miracles of healing back to be butchered again. 

Gradually the women walked into his life and were around 

him everywhere. 
He had always believed that one woman in a million is a 

born surgeon, and no more than one. 
He had always believed that modern life brutalizes women 

as war brutalizes all men but the finest and strong- 
est. 
He saw himself surrounded by women bacteriologists, 

women anaestheticisers, women internes and women 

assistants everywhere. 
He saw them set themselves to be hard in work that they 

hated, in work that he had always loved before. 



THE OPERATION 153 

And it hurt him more to work with them, than to fail with 
the finest body that war had ever mangled and sent 
back broken to his hands. 

He began to feel that he was operating with only a claw of 
a thumb and one finger left on each hand. 

He began to feel that all surgery in Vienna for the next 
fifty years was fated to work pitiably as he was work- 
ing. 

There was one woman that seemed to him harder than any 

man he had seen with a scalpel in his hand. 
And because she was competent beyond the rest she came 

in time to be his chief assistant. 
And it enraged him that she was beautiful as women are 

rarely beautiful; 
Fine in every line and hair and nerve of her, and fit to be 

the mother of heroes and still finer mothers of stronger 

heroes. 
And she seemed to him like a thoroughbred racehorse 

chained to a butcher cart. 
And he began to feel that he must break her or be broken 

himself. 

He began to scheme to shake her and to break her and he 
began to succeed, 

And they began to operate one day and she trembled and 
bungled, and he drove her and cursed her who had 
never cursed man or woman in his work before. 



i 5 4 WAR FLAMES 

She grew whiter and whiter, she moved slower and slower, 
and at last she dropped and lay in a heap at his feet. 

And the orderlies carried her out as he tied his arteries; 
and he went on with all the strength he had torn from 
her and finished his operation triumphantly alone. 

As he was washing his hands, his head nurse came to him 

raging and telling him it was her friend's lover's life 

he had saved. 
He drove her from him and disciplined her. He went up 

to his study and sat down there alone with his head 

in his hands. 
And as he brooded a passion of tears broke from him as 

pus breaks from an ulcer when a lancet's point 

pierces it. 
And he understood that life was operating on him, and he 

sat there motionless in his chair and let it work its 

will with him. 

After the space of two hours he walked out quietly and 
went up to the ward where the woman sat by her 
lover's bedside. 

He looked at the chart and took the pulse and the tempera- 
ture and the respiration, mechanically, knowing that 
all went well with them. 

He brought a chair and placed it close to the woman's 
and sat down and held out his hand to her, 



MITZI 155 

And she looked at him curiously, and shrank and stiffened, 
and then suddenly moved by something vital operat- 
ing in her, she laid her hand in his. 

And as they sat there they began to feel that God sends 
His wars into the world for its healing, to estrange 
His stronger souls; 

Slashing their passions apart to the quick as a knife slashes 
a wound: 

And then invincibly, with the sure healing of time, bring- 
ing them back inevitably, indissolubly together. 

March 16, 1916. 

MITZI 

Mitzi sits clipping the tattered newspapers and frayed 

sporting sheets from the Cafe Zum Sterne. 
And another young night life of Wien is piling them up 

twenty deep and lacing them up into huge paper 

blankets for soldiers. 
And two nuns tack them up into vast shallow bags of gray 

gingham besmeared with blue roses in wreaths. 

Mitzi resents the grayness and the blueness bitterly. 
And she bitterly resents the greasy blackness of the fat 

nun's robes and the dingy whiteness of her coif; 
And the air of perpetual fasting, and incense and unwashed 

flesh, of poor blood and bad breath, that the thin 

one with pimples brings with her. 



156 WAR FLAMES 

And dimly she resents the spritual snobbery of these 

women and their air of professional martyrdom that 

maddens her. 
Some one once said she would die a nun herself, and she 

shrieked and struck him with a carafe in the cafe 

across the way. 

Mitzi thrusts a scurrilous chromo of a nude woman be- 
tween two blear eyed soldiers under the nose of the 

thin nun and snatches another sheet. 
She forgets the pimpled face where pride says "You are 

dirt like this printed dirt and it is my virtue that I 

suffer you!" 
Mitzi sees a picture of a handsome lad in the Kaiser's 

Hungarians who gave her a whole happy day at 

Schonbrun once. 
Next to him is a brute and a beast who had her the night 

they mobilized and beat her, beating her wages down 

to five kronen in paper. 
And they are both dead for Austria in Serbia like the 

handsomest one who sent her the postcards and 

Serbian knife from Belgrade. 

Mitzi bitterly resents her own black clothes and half 
starved air that are the outward and visible signs of 
the war in her. 



MITZI 157 

She is half gypsy, half Viennese, slim, dark, with a blue- 
eyed vividness and shy violence that has grown stark 
from the gutter and so far foraged successfully for 
itself. 

And the war so far has only half tamed her, half starved 
her, half wasted her small hoard of gold that she hides 
between two fire bricks in a garret where she finds no 
fire to burn. 

She is lean and lithe as a gutter cat, with the half starved 
gutter cat's intense vitality in the undiminished and 
time-hardened hungry half of her. 

There is a husky half purr in her throat still as she stands 
up and stretches, bidding big Bertha bring more 
papers quickly and Big Bertha startled, gets up 
quickly and goes and fetches them. 

Mitzi sits down and clips furiously with her scissors, 
thinking of the Revolution in France and the 
guillotine and the nuns and the Austrian Antoinette. 

She remembers the kings and queens that were the begin- 
ning of wars in her history books, and she wonders 
what the end of them in this one will be. 

She wonders what the end of it all will be for her in a Vi- 
enna without either money or men enough to go 
around. 



158 WAR FLAMES 

She goes out at the end of her day's work and glares venom- 
ously at women chauffeurs, women train conductors, 
women sweepers, women in the places of men every- 
where. 

She turns from them to a hat shop harping on shop girls, 
chorus girls, opera singers, women of title, fast women 
of wealth and the underworld, who were her bitter 
business rivals in the old bright night life of waste 
that is ended. 

And she knows that women may be brutes more merciless 
than men to other women in the other wars of sex and 
hunger life is always waging. 

And she knows that the day is coming when the hand of 
every married woman in Vienna and every one who 
hopes to be married, will be lifted implacably against 
her. 

And she sees one of the new policewomen standing in a 
square; and she spits at her behind the woman's 
back! 

And she sees a girl child at a window killing flies and she 
hates that girl child as she hates the other. 

For Mitzi is a fly herself, with the flame in her wings 
wasting and dying, that fed on offal and bred in offal 
for centuries. 



MITZI 159 

She is a plague of flies that must be ended in every capital 
of chaos where West makes war on East. 

Mitzi remembers police spies, police inspectors, police 
judges and surgeons, and the tribute she paid them 
in money, and as her kind can pay in kind. 

Sometimes a kiss or caress, a jest or a gesture, an hour, 
a night, a year or more of her working time. 

And Mitzi sees in front of her the policewoman who must 
come to demand money of her alone and always 
money, and never love so long as they both live. 

Mitzi climbs her five flights of stairs; she peers from her 

window and sees the shadow of the policewoman 

passing and repassing outside. 
She bars her door, masks her keyhole, draws her shades, 

kneels and feels her gold behind cold fire bricks in 

her hearth. 
Mitzi kindles scraps that she has filched from the pictured 

and printed life of the town and sees the flare die 

down as she kneels there. 
Mitzi rests her head on her hands on the bricks before her 

hoard, and feels for the little Serbian knife in its 

sheath sewed to the garter her last lover gave her. 
Mitzi gathers her gutter soul as she kneels on her empty 

hearth and she shudders interminably in the shadow 

of the policewoman waiting to exterminate her. 

March 12, 1916. 



160 WAR FLAMES 

DIMINUENDO 

An old man stands alone by a grand piano in a great 

room in Vienna. 
There is dust on the wood, on the keys, on the floor and 

on the folds of tall half-drawn curtains. 
And the grime and the grayness of life show in his rough 

shaved face, and the close clipped edges of cuffs no 

more immaculate. 
And in the score of an untried sonata that lies where he 

dropped it in the dust two days ago. 

He sits down and lays his hands listlessly upon the keys. 
He lays his head on his hands that cling like a priest's 

to an altar where he offers up everything. 
He seems to hold the cold hands of a friend that dies, and 

the skeleton fingers of an hour that has passed beyond 

desire or hope. 
He lifts his head and stares blankly through shadowy 

curtains to a still and empty street. 

Dry leaves eddy there, and vague wraiths drift through 

still and empty spaces in his mind. 
And an inconstant procession of his pupils for the last 

ten years appears by fits and starts. 
Hundreds of his countrymen and women to whom he 

preached that the heart knows no frontiers and art 

no nationality; 



DIMINUENDO 161 

A huge Russian's hands of a blacksmith turned Apollo, 
an English lad's fingering facile and swift as the play 
of the sunlight on rapids at noon; 

Talent in a French girl's lips that spelled their love of music 
silently, in wistful smiles; 

Genius in a Jew's keen eyes, who seized the center of the 
universe in sound and held it trembling at his finger- 
tips through ten eternal seconds. 

All the compassion of a million misereres in an Italian 
widow's soul that kneeling nakedly, looked up 
through streaming eyes. 

And the child's laughter and the kitten's coaxing of two 
small Americans of whom he made two perfect little 
phonographs of facile phrasing. 

He sits staring and wishing that even the smallest and 

most frivolous American was back again, 
For she learned quickly, who had so little to be right or 

wrong with, and she was as perfect a type of human 

expression to its limit, as the Jew was. 
And he sits there thinking of the others, of the Germans 

and Austrians, the French and Russians, the English 

and Italians, Belgians and Serbs; 
All to whom he taught harmony, murdering others and 

themselves; all that live still studying strenuously 

to murder more. 



1 62 WAR FLAMES 

And he seems to hear all war's horrors suddenly under 
a microscope of sound shaking him with a passion 
neither Beethoven nor Pales trina could ever begin 
to suggest. 

And the cold fit suddenly comes and grips him as he clings 

to the keys in a silence beyond all sound, 
And all things grow small and crucially distinct; and he 

remembers his little American girl again. 
And he begins to make music in miniature, like a minuet 

of Mozart's, refined to tones and semitones that quiver 

in the drone of a mosquito or a midge. 
And an art microscopic and sure as Japanese carving in 

ivory possesses him as he composes and transposes 

his Doll's Wedding March. 
And he grows silent again as the light begins to go again. 
And all his youth and the years beyond youth that he has 

wasted and mislaid, gather themselves for one last 

appeal to life, 
And all the small tragedy of a child's heart betrayed and 

at war with the universe resounds through the room, 

as his hands record the poignant plaintiveness of the 

Dirge for a Doll. 

March 15, 1916. 



SERBIA 



THE TRAP 

Twice they thrust back Austria in bitter slaughter from 

their mountain tops. 
For freedom holds the hills for Serbia, freedom her foster 

father, throttling down death in the dark. 
Now a mob that was an army once is plodding through a 

snowbound pass to torment. 
And every step they take is a station of the cross in the 

Calvary of a race crucified for men on the mountains. 

The snow is red with blood where they tread on it, and 

their bandages are black and stiff with frozen blood. 
Their eyes are holes of hate where horror stares from faces 

grown as grim and gray as are the rocks around them. 
Their entrails are as empty as the empty rifles that they 

trail and clutch for crutches. 
Their minds are empty of revenge, fear, murder, lustings, 

all things but the utter need of dying brutes that 

drives them. 

The mountains are immense, white, imminent, and cold 

and hard as the clenched hands of death that hold 

them. 
And his breath is hot on their trail when the Bulgars find 

the range for a mountain battery that smokes and 

snarls above them. 

165 



166 WAR FLAMES 

The shells fall and shatter the rocks where he treads; 

they print huge tracks in tainted snowdrifts that 

they still struggle through. 
And the sky clouds with a smother of snow, and lets down 

a sullen and leaden lid on the trap. 

February 10, 1916. 

THE MASSACRE OF MOTORS 

Six hundred Serbian boys under fifteen swooned and 
agonized at Isbek, 

Out of a thousand snared from Pristina, stumbling strug- 
gling through the blizzard. 

Dragging men's rifles made to murder birds and squirrels 
and half starved rabbits alone; 

Six hundred out of thirty thousand murdered in the 
mountains, filing past slowly into the blinding pall of 
white. 

Human things that were starving and suffering more 

terribly trailed behind the motor cars. 
Where the motors were starved and were weakened on 

the steep and snow clogged trails. 
The fire in them froze and their steel hearts beat faint as 

the spark thinned and the last petrol failed. 
Till at the top of the hill where the trail twists as it falls 

to the river, the word went out to destroy them. 



THE MASSACRE OF MOTORS 167 

Some of the soldier chauffeurs had saved bombs for this 

purpose or that. 
They set their time fuses and sprinted from sudden geysers 

of noise and of flame. 
And one Italian volunteer with a truer instinct for tragedy, 
Set his car at the turn of the trail at the third speed, and 

then leapt from it as it started. 

And the mountains as old as the matter in the motors and 
the mind that conceived this saw a new and terrible 
finale, 

To the drama of bursting shells and breaking hearts in a 
nation's martyrdom; 

Looked down through the snow that beat as it fell on a 
cataract of Cadillacs, Fiats, Fords, Diamlers, Peu- 
geots, Lancias; falling, splashing over the cliff; 

Plunging in fragments as spray scatters, shattered on the 
rocks and the sands of the river. 

Soldiers in blood stained sheepskins stood staring at this 

murder newer and more mad than the daily and 

nightly murdering of men and boys. 
One with the heart of a hillman and a poet exulted, 
Seeing the mountains and the storm shaking away the 

machines that were strangling the bend; 
And as the last huge Mercedes went roaring and crashing 

from a cliff face into the abyss, 



168 WAR FLAMES 

" There goes Germany at last," he shouted, aiming and 

sending bullet after bullet to follow it. 
And his comrades thought he was mad, as so many had 

become already and were yet to become. 

August 3, 1916. 



MONTENEGRO 



VERA 

She was the last and the least of the last refugees, from the 
last and the least of the war martyred nations. 

Starving men gave her their last shreds of food as they 
tramped from Cetigne and doubled and dodged past 
Scutari. 

Men lying dying reached up, handing half inches of life 
that was hot in the dregs of canteens, passing the 
torch to her hands as they passed. 

Women that faltered and froze on their feet, wrapped her 
in garments of life that wore thin in the ice of the bliz- 
zard. 

Bullets fell dead at her feet and she clambered past tor- 
rents that tore through the ice on red bridges and 
dams of the dead. 

Rocks that were shaken by shells stayed their fall till her 
light tread crept childishly past. 

Snowslides before and behind her shrank by her like wolves 
that were gorged with the wounded. 

Still she went on through the night to the light, that 
showed her black vultures above her Black Mountain. 
171 



172 WAR FLAMES 

Still she went on up the shell shattered pass, past the dead, 

to the summit, and panting and crawling, 
Saw half the world changed to sea in a second where 

mountains dive down in league long waves of stone: 
Saw a half circle of steel gray horizon below like a limitless 

wide road to freedom; 
Crept down the grade, rolled and fell past the rocks, 

dashed her light weight down and drank from snow 

water. 

Light came and warned her and showed her her road and 

a Bulgar patrol came and lifted her up. 
She was a child and too small for their spoiling; she was a 

child and they warmed her and fed her; 
Bound up her bruises and washed her stained face and 

lifted her high on their shoulders and loved her. 
Carried her safe in their arms when she slept, and smiled 

when she waked and she whispered "Durzazo." 

Showed her her trail leading still to the sea; cheered when 

she went while they watched from the mountains. 
So she came down to the old port at last. There was a 

ship loaded down to the guards. 
There was the last boat just leaving the quay, turning 

once more to the shore when they saw her. 
There was a woman whose arms opened wide; there was 

the place of a dead child she filled there. 



VERA 173 

There was a storm whose strength died as she came; there 

was a submarine peril that missed her. 
There was a shadow that darkened the sky; there was a 

singing in heaven above her, 
And she saw the men flying in air, and in wonder she 

smiled at sea fountains where bombs burst in beauty. 
And she saw strange destroyers that circled around her 

and brought her at last like a queen to Brindisi. 

There was a friend of her father that found her; there was 

a queen of her country that kissed her, 
There was a villa whose windows looked eastward and 

seaward and homeward to scarred Montenegro. 
There were war orphans who made her their playmates; 

there was a garden that claimed her and cured her; 
Just one pale slip of a girl time transplanted to live to her 
day to be mother of heroes. 

March 18, 1916. 



TURKEY 



IN ARMENIA 

The desert is hunger here, savage and insatiable. 

And the sunrise is the beginning of a madman's thirst 

that makes mirages, 
In the mind of an American missionary who lies on his 

heap of sheep skins at the top of a cliff near Kermagh- 

Boghasy; 
Seeing the cinders of a Titan's gridiron of torture rekindled 

in every shard of color in the valley below; 
Watching his Kurdish servant lighting a little cooking fire 

of withered grasses and shredded camel dung on a 

rock ledge beneath him. 

He remembers as his broken leg burns and grates when he 

moves, 
An empty Armenian house at Endere and an inscription 

on the walls; 
Our home is on the mountain top, we no longer need a 

room; 
We have already drunk the draught of death; we no longer 

need a judge. 



177 



178 WAR FLAMES 

He remembers the first mob of women and children driven 

into Ezeroum from Harput; 
And the German nurse who wanted so dreadfully to believe 

that the German consul had nothing to do with all 

those organized massacres and endless drives to death. 
And he hears her soft south-German accents slurring and 

breaking as she told him how they came; 
Ragged, filthy, half naked, starved, sick, falling and flogged 

and goaded like dying cattle to struggle to their feet 

and fall again and again; 
Fed like cattle with dusty hay, and clubbed till they died 

when they struggled like cattle to snatch at it. 

He remembers the nurse's tears as she told of the doctors 
who segregated the strongest and the prettiest girls 
for seraglios in Broussa and Stamboul; 

And the clamor of despair of the others who were left who 
tore their hair and their flesh, shrieking and sobbing, 
Save us! 

We are willing to become Moslems or Germans or whatever 
you want us to become; 

Only save us! We are to be taken to Kermagh-Boghasy to 
be beheaded! 

He remembers the look on the German woman's face as 

she turned to him and said, 
"You are an American, and a man, and a missionary, and 

you speak the language. 



IN ARMENIA 179 

What can you do? What are you going to do? What 
will your people and your president do?" 

And he remembers thinking as he stole away that Judg- 
ment Day had indubitably come to Ezeroum and all 
earth as horribly as to him. 

He remembers hours and days of blood-lust, fire and pil- 
lage, raping and madness where he lost himself; 

The mad priest in his minaret who shot more than two 
hundred of the women and boys and girls as they were 
driven past him; 

The cultured and humane Moslems who sheltered him and 
who wept as they told him of these things; 

And who protested time and time again that not the 
Turkish but the German government had ordered 
these massacres and this annihilation. 

Stray phrases and blinding visions of this madman's dream 

of a martyrdom of a nation come back to him; 
Words of a Turkish gendarme who said, "Why should we 

kill them at home? 
They must be made miserable and must be driven where 

we need not smell them or be forced to make them 

bury each other ;" 



180 WAR FLAMES 

Visions of girls pleading for poison or lancets or needles from 
German and Turkish doctors as they checked them off; 

Drippings of puddles of blood from ledges in places where 
the dead had been taken away the day before when 
the bowlder fell on him. 

The sun rises higher, and below him eyes of death in vul- 
tures' heads are hovering and gathering to this valley 
in the desert; 

And like the last of the last herd in a summer and winter 
of drought, the last of the last three thousand from 
Erzingan come stumbling down the defile at the head 
of the valley. 

The Kurdish servant puts his fire out and hides behind 
a rock crossing himself and cursing furtively. 

And his master sees the gendarmes and their helpers lining 
up the women and girls along the low cliffs that fence 
in the far side of their death trap; 

Ten gendarmes with their German rifles, and a mob of 
men and boys with knives and stones from the nearest 
villages. 

And he hears the first rifle shot: and sees the doll's figures 
running and stumbling and kneeling and falling. 

And in the colder intensity of his fever as a cloud comes 

over the sun, 
He feels as far away, in his half mile of width, and his 

hundred feet of height in the air, from it all, 



IN ARMENIA 181 

As any of the men and women, monarchs and ministers, 
over mountains and over sea, who have suborned and 
suffered this thing to be. 

And as the sun comes out again and the last shrieks and 
strangling sobbings have ceased, and as his fever 
grips him; 

He lifts himself on one elbow and shakes one fist in the face 
of the sun and cries and curses them all: 

Kaiser, President, Senator, Secretary; Geheimrath, Chan- 
cellor, Oberst ; Pasha, Mullah and madmen who have 
brought this shame on the faces of God and of men 
today. 

And as the voice of his weakness and the madness of its 

fever ceases, 
As the last Kurd throws his last stone at senseless flesh 

that shudders still. 
The vultures are falling down their black funnel of famine 

on the mountain tops. 
And clouds of flies are gathering to cover the carrion as 

the German armies gathered and swarmed over 

Serbia and Belgium. 
And the hunger and thirst of the desert drinks in the 

blood that drips drop by drop, as it drinks the drops 

of rain that falls at last; 

To cool the face of a martyred and tormented land where 

man the master of toxins and tides annihilates himself. 

November 17, 1916. 



BULGARIA 



THE PROPHET 

The old horse scarred with bullets at Chactalja staggers 

and sways as he goes. 
The lean ox thrusts his galled shoulders against the yoke, 

and limps nearer to butchery and the pause for breath 

at the end of the field. 
The old Bulgar peasant straightens his furrow, and drives 

past the flank of the foothill into a hollow of shadow 

where the clay clots and the plow moves slower till 

it stops. 
And the plow shears through, till the ranks of furrows 

roused and marching are more than the space of 

earth asleep in the fallow. 

The sun climbs high and steams in the incense of earth, 

a slow wind wafts away, like the smoke and the reek 

of war, 
Skylarks choir over a ritual older than any men made in 

the churches war sweeps from the world of today. 
Furrow on furrow, forward and back, makes response as 

the plowing advances. 
Three old frail lives, fated to sacrifice, tramp in a swaying 

processional nearer an altar of stone and the shadow 

of a cliff that falls from the side of the valley to the 

west. 

185 



186 WAR FLAMES 

From the west and the south near Saloniki comes the low 

bellow of guns. 
And the old horse hears it and quickens his stride for a 

step and the ox shakes his head and then settles to 

shoulder the yoke. 
The old man lifts his chin half an inch, the old eyes seem 

to see his sons at Tchactala dying with the domes of 

the city in sight. 
And the old head suddenly sags, and the old shoulders 

bow themselves once more lower and nearer to the 

earth that always waits for them. 

Time has plowed his face and weathered it and made 
him one with the earth. 

It has made him a high priest whose worship is wasted for 
a time in a nation of peasants mocked and betrayed 
by war lords and lying diplomats. 

It has made him a prophet of men marching on through 
seasons of sorrow and loss, sowing new life for the 
world as he goes. 

Sure that whatever else shall fail, the life of the grain shall 
grow from the blackness of earth, to fruition, 

And in the faith that holds him to his plowshare scribing 
the oldest gospel of all, is the love that man's prophets 
with plowshares and shells to the hearts of the hea- 
then proclaim. 

March 20, 19 16. 



ROUMANIA 



THE ASSIZE 

There is a gap in a row of houses in a residence street in 

Bucharest: 
Pieces of a German bomb from a Parsival lie mixed with 

blackened blood and rotting flesh in the hole that was 

the basement. 
The roof is gone and the floors are gone, but the side walls 

and the back wall remain. 
On one side there are traces of the stairs by which happy 

people once mounted to love and birth and death 

undesecrated. 

On one wall on the third floor a portrait of Carmen Sylva 

hangs with its glass still unshattered. 
In one corner of what was once the nursery a bird cage is 

suspended from a crumbling patch of ceiling. 
It sways slightly in the wind as two idlers watch it, but the 

bird that once sang to them and all the world from his 

swinging porch is silent. 
It is the fourth day since the bomb fell, and he lies on the 

floor of his cage, a huddled and motionless heap of 

feathers that war has made a mystery. 
189 



190 WAR FLAMES 

And a woman sobbing her heart out for her husband and 

her baby who sang to her, 
Joins with four million more women and widows in Rou- 

mania and all Europe and her colonies, 
Passionately and persistently demanding an accounting 

of God and man, 

Against some man that here did murder at midnight to 

manhood. 

October 26, 1916. 



ENVOY 



OUR SHARE 

America, last mother of all earth, 

Defiled and thwarted by man's sins today, 

Wasted by women, frail, unfit to pray; 

Now while old ties and treaties tremble, fall away, 

While through black midnights maddened millions still 

must kill and cause to slay, 
Till God's tomorrow lives at last through the grim throes 

of battle's birth: 

Now while the world makes war by land and sea, 

When from God's throne of glory in the air, 

Into decision's valley, past each prayer 

Of fighting man and child and mother trembling there, 

The shells of judgment bear despair; mother of earth 

where stands thy share 
In man's last fight for love and light, for faith and larger 

liberty? 

We see thy sins and thy first sufferings, 
We were not strong and sure. We were not wise. 
Unfit, unready, we put faith in lies. 
Here children starve. Despairing here man's spirit dies. 

193 



194 WAR FLAMES 

Even as Belgium we were weak. The guiltless still we 

sacrifice 
Till dies our greed and listlessness, and land and glory 

lust of kings. 

Here food and work we waste, like land and gold. 

We were not armed and fit, the right's right hand. 

More women walk our streets. More workers stand 

Idle and empty handed, waiting God's command, 

" Send food and life to all my earth." Our women wasted 

life. We planned 
To sell thee like our harlots where our honor and our 

souls we sold. 

Therefore our share comes back to us again. 

We were not fit and fine. And we must pay 

For Belgium's rape; for England's fear today; 

For war's wild fury wiping farms and faith away; 

For lies and lusts let loose and crowned with blood stained 

steel. Our truth they slay 

Thy mother, Mother, till we rise, and out of ruins make 

us men. 

October 16, 1914. 



Printed in the United States of America 



*T*HE following pages contain advertisements of a 
few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects. 



EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON'S NEW BOOK 

Merlin 

By EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 

" Edwin Arlington Robinson during the last few years 
has come to be considered by many the leading American 
poet of the generation now reaching its artistic maturity. 
It is safe to predict that his popularity will increase rather 
than diminish." It was The New York Times that made 
this statement shortly after the appearance of Mr. Robin- 
son's last book of verse, The Man Against the Sky. This, 
and the added fact that The Times in this opinion but 
voices the verdict of critics everywhere, lends importance 
to the publication of Mr. Robinson's new book, Merlin, a 
narrative poem, which will be found quite as valuable a 
contribution to American letters as any of its author's 
previous works. Mr. Robinson's theme is the Arthurian 
legend to which he has brought the originality which his 
readers have come to expect of him and which he has 
adorned with all the arts of the great poet that he truly is. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



WILFRID WILSON GIBSON'S NEW BOOK 

Livelihood I Dramatic Reveries 

By WILFRID WILSON GIBSON 

Author of "Daily Bread," etc. 

Cloth, i2tno, $1.25 

Here Wilfrid Wilson Gibson gives us another book much 
in the manner of his first success — Daily Bread. Under 
the title of Livelihood he writes of common, ordinary things, 
and of people whose lives are, for the most part, bound 
up in the making of a living. The collection includes The 
Shaft, dealing with a miner who lost his way in deep, dark, 
underground passages, and almost perished; The Orchestra, 
of a fiddler in a theatre orchestra; The Blast Furnace, a 
gripping bit of tragedy; Makeshifts, with its philosophy 
of humble life, and The Lamp, a powerful narrative of 
the sea and of a wife who waited vainly for her husband's 
return. 

"Mr. Gibson is a poet of the people, a lyricist who pene- 
trates the heart of humanity." — Review of Reviews. 

"Mr. Gibson is a genuine singer of his own day and 
turns into appealing harmony the world's harshly jarring 
notes of poverty and pain." — The Outlook. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Road to Castaly 

By ALICE BROWN 
Author of "Children of Earth," "The Prisoner," etc. 

Readers of Children of Earth, and of many other of 
Miss Brown's books for that matter, must have seen many 
an evidence about them of the really natural poet. Some 
years ago, furthermore, she published a little collection of 
verse which was warmly received by the critics, and which 
served to intensify the desire for more. This volume, then, 
will be welcome to Miss Brown's admirers, and to litera- 
ture lovers generally. It contains the earlier poems re- 
ferred to, which were, as a matter of fact, also issued under 
the title of The Road to Castaly, and much new material 
as well — the poet's latest and most mature work. 

Poems 

By RALPH HODGSON 

Ralph Hodgson, to whom the Edward de Polignac 
prize was recently awarded, already has many admirers 
in this country who will welcome the publication of this 
selection from his writings. The volume includes Mr. 
Hodgson's best and latest work, and shows him to be a 
poet of rare feeling and power. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



Yzd 



ra 

By LOUIS V. LEDOUX 

New Edition 

Mr. Ledoux's The Story of Eleusis, published last year, 
has been commended by critics of poetry, and lovers of 
the classic drama. Yzdra, which now follows it, will be 
found no less worthy. It deals with a Princess who is sup- 
posed to have acquired the quality of poisoning. She is 
sent by King Poros, her father, to poison Alexander the 
Great. She falls in love with Alexander and he with her, 
and rather than fulfill her mission she kills herself. In 
Mr. Ledoux's hands this becomes a theme of power and 
to it he brings his great skill as poet and dramatist. 

A Play by Sir Rabindranath Tagore 

The Cycle of Spring: A Play 

By SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE 

Cloth, i2tno, $1.25 

This, the latest and richest of the author's plays, was 
recently performed in the courtyard of his Calcutta home 
by the masters and boys of Shantiniketan. The success 
was immense: and naturally, for the spirit of the play is 
the spirit of universal youth, filled with laughter and lyric 
fervour, jest and pathos and resurgence: immortal youth 
whose every death is a rebirth, every winter an enfolded 
spring. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



Men, Women and Ghosts 

By AMY LOWELL 

Boards t $1.25; Leather, $1.60 

This collection of stories in verse gives free rein to Miss 
Lowell's versatile imagination and the result is a new 
demonstration of her genius, a book the individual pieces 
of which, whether written in old form or new, are all 
instinct with force and fire. 

"Probably the most perfect piece of imagism Miss 
Lowell, or any of the imagists, for that matter, has accom- 
plished . . . perhaps the best collection the author has 
yet published." — Chicago Evening Post. 

"Clearly and definitely the verse-stories in 'Men, 
Women and Ghosts,' place Miss Lowell among the con- 
temporary poets who have arrived . . . the energy alone 
which could produce a collection of poems such as 'Men, 
Women and Ghosts,' is remarkable, but when that energy 
is touched with that power of insight and emotion which 
endows the results with beauty, then the poet is of that 
creative fellowship with the divine, which is shared by 
no other of the sons of man." — Boston Transcript. 

"I have read with the keenest pleasure 'Men, Women 
and Ghosts.' I find it to be poetry as authentic as any 
we know. It is individual, innocent of echo and imitation, 
and in the main unique, with the uniqueness that comes of 
personal genius." — Reedy 's Mirror. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 61-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



JRD214. 



H> , o « o 




DOBBS BROS 







12084 ^ 






ml 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

iiiliiiiKIiilllGiiJiiliiiiiiill 

O 018 482 177 1 



